Week Seven of Genius Hour Two - CGI in Space

Last week, I said I was going to go for a space scene this week, but also that I wasn't going to worry about making it look really good.  As such, this scene took much less time than the other scenes and gave me a little break.

First off, I needed a planet.  I got the idea for the planet surface from this website.  It is done using a Musgrave texture and another texture.  The Musgrave is fed into a color ramp.  This changes the color from black and white to the color of your choosing.  I also fed various other textures into the Musgrave texture to see what I would get.  The top image with the rings is a Voronoi texture fed into a Musgrave texture.

 

The Musgrave texture can be used to create some very unique noise.  I only used the fBM type Musgrave noise, but there are other types.  The above shows the hetero terrain type.  It is used, as you might expect, to generate terrain.  There are also a few other interesting things you can do with it, and it is used often in procedural textures.  This website goes into the other types and has pictures of them.

Eventually, I decided on a look I liked, so I started on the sky.  There is a procedural sky add-on called dynamic sky.  It generates clouds and light.  Like other procedural textures, it can be easily changed.  I mentioned in my previous blog that procedural textures are better than image textures.  This is why.  The look of the material can be changed by moving a couple of sliders.  For an image texture, you have to change the image if you want a different look.

I got the idea to use this add-on during my bathroom scene last week.  I was playing around with a number of the add-ons for that scene, and although dynamic sky wasn't used, I looked into what it could do.  It was then that I found this post explaining how to get various skies with the add-on.  One of them told you how to make stars.  To do this, I had to dig through the web of nodes to find the ones I needed to change.

Eventually, I get some nice looking stars.  Unfortunately, the horizon can only be lowered so far.  This meant the camera is actually looking up into the sky.  It is not noticeable due to the solid black background.

Now, it was time for the ship.  I looked around for some inspiration, and I thought about some sort of massive carrier.  I saw some ships that huge fronts meant for ramming into other ships, so I tried to go for that.  However, I was having trouble working with that idea, so I moved onto a different plan.

My next decision was to start working on the back thrusters of a ship and see where that took me.  I messed up while scaling and extruding a part of the thruster, but got a neat look.  To get the side thruster, I duplicated the body of the craft and then deleted the unnecessary parts.  A little editing closed a hole, giving what looks like a jet turbine.

These two smaller thrusters were placed by the main one, and a fin was added.  Note how the stars only fill half the image.  That is why I had to angle the camera as mentioned above.

The front of the ship was a bit difficult.  I settled on a sort of oval thing.  This would be where the ship is piloted from.

While researching, I noticed a lot of ships had a ring around them.  The reasoning behind this is that the ring would spin and generated an artificial gravity field.  At first, I added some loop cuts and extruded out the resulting section.  Some creases cleaned it up.

To make a series of beams connecting the ring to the ship, I insetted the circle's face and deleted alternating faces.  However, the subsurface caused a bit of a mess, and I had to add in numerous faces by hand.

While trying the ring again, I decided to try the pipe mesh, which was one of the add-ons.  It gave a cool look, but couldn't be used.

What I finally did was make a duplicate of the cylinder.  I extruded certain faces, and then let the two objects clip through each other.  Finally, a boolean subtract modifier was added.  This worked pretty well, but still required a lot of fixes by hand.  Many faces didn't generate, some had the normals reversed, and others were doubled up.  I mainly focussed on the missing faces as they were going to be the most noticeable.

I got the scene all set up and added a glow for the thrusters.

Here it is!  Beautiful space CGI.  Here is the download link.  This scene took about two and a half hours to render at twenty-three hundred samples.  I also turned on the denoiser, and I, unfortunately, got some of those swirls I mentioned before.  They are on the underside of the main thruster.  They occur when the denoiser needs to smooth out a lot of noise.  Since it is sort of averaging the color, a noisy image will mean that the averaged color is more likely to be off.   Since this scene didn't take all that long, I decided to do another one.

I first started by changing the planet.  I went for a more Earthly look.  I changed the settings a few times through the process to get a better look, but it was done using the same method.

Here is a cool, robotic planet.

Similar to the robot I made, I brought in an image to work off of.  This time, I was going to do the NASA space shuttle.  However, I was not liking the look, and I found a better image.  As such, I started over.

I started with a cube for the base instead of a cylinder.  I also used an image that came with a side and top view.  This meant that they were in scale with each other.  Two separate images of the side and top would probably not be to the same scale so they would be hard to use.  That same issue came up with my robot.  There was no complex modeling done here, and most of the parts are separate objects.

I finally got this.  I wanted to keep it low-poly so it really looks like CGI and because it would hind any mistakes I made.

I was rotating the ship to get a good view.  Whenever you scale or rotate something, you can use the global axes or the local axes.  Sometimes it can be better to use one or the other.  In the case of rotating the ship, the global axes were the best choice.  Rotating about the local axes rotates around each object's own set of axes.  Since they are all different objects with different rotation values, rotating them all at once via the local axes causes them to go all over the place, as seen above.

Here's a full shot of the ship in material mode.  The final render doesn't let you see everything.  The decals were added with the shrinkwrap modifier, like for the bathroom scene.

And here is the second scene!  This time, I choose to do 5000 samples.  I finished the scene early in the day, so the hours of waiting did not cause any problems.  I stopped the scene from rendering numerous times, however.  One reason was that while typing this blog, I decided I wanted a different looking planet.  The second time was because I needed to change the material.  The third was due to me messing up and changing the wrong material.

I mentioned in my first post and, I believe, during my Shark Tank speech, that I wanted to model a scene based off of an image.  Since next week is the final week, I think I will do it then.  I took a bunch of photos around the school.  I think that modeling a real-life scene we pass by every day would be cool.  It would also give me a chance to check out materials and lighting, which I couldn't do with some random photo from the Net.  Alex said to do the outside of the school, but the brick material would be very difficult.  However, I will have a week or so in between the TED talk and my last blog.

Tune in next week for a 3D model of some room in the school!