Repair Ship Pump
greentooth
UPDATE: High Poly complete!
Check this post for more images and a turnaround: http://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2628215/#Comment_2628215
OP:
Hey all!
I'm currently working on a small scene/prop for a large project I'm building towards. I'll get into too many details below, but first my latest renders:
No details are set in stone and much of it is just blockouts, so any critique that can be offered will be put to good use!
The Why's and the What's
This piece is part of a long term project I'm working on. In an effort to both build my portfolio towards being hireable in gamedev and do personal work that I enjoy, I'll be creating multiple real-time (UE4) and offline (Corona) rendered pieces based around a fictional sci-fi book cover over the next year+.
See the link above for many more images and development.
As I developed the scene for what would've been a simple station render, I became invested in worldbuilding and growing my design skills. I quickly realized that for many reasons this would be better suited as multiple projects of different scopes.
So, this first piece is a small part of a repair ship which creates a scaffold-like structure to mount to larger crafts it's working on, like the station. The idea started with this design challenge:
From spending a great deal of time considering how to create tension between two free floating bodies, the best solution I came up with involves making the scaffold lattice out of braided hoses which become taught when filled with fluid:
I found this solution really interesting and fun to work on, so I picked the pumps as the first real-time piece. A big challenge for me has been in considering real world use: Designing for repair procedures in and out of atmosphere/gravity, regular pump operation, etc. I hope in the end for this to feel like something that could plausibly exist.
If you've made it this far I appreciate your time and interest! As I mention above, this will be a small UE4 scene. While I'm not totally sure on composition yet, I'll leave you with the first doodle I did to that end:
Check this post for more images and a turnaround: http://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2628215/#Comment_2628215
OP:
Hey all!
I'm currently working on a small scene/prop for a large project I'm building towards. I'll get into too many details below, but first my latest renders:
No details are set in stone and much of it is just blockouts, so any critique that can be offered will be put to good use!
The Why's and the What's
This piece is part of a long term project I'm working on. In an effort to both build my portfolio towards being hireable in gamedev and do personal work that I enjoy, I'll be creating multiple real-time (UE4) and offline (Corona) rendered pieces based around a fictional sci-fi book cover over the next year+.
See the link above for many more images and development.
As I developed the scene for what would've been a simple station render, I became invested in worldbuilding and growing my design skills. I quickly realized that for many reasons this would be better suited as multiple projects of different scopes.
So, this first piece is a small part of a repair ship which creates a scaffold-like structure to mount to larger crafts it's working on, like the station. The idea started with this design challenge:
From spending a great deal of time considering how to create tension between two free floating bodies, the best solution I came up with involves making the scaffold lattice out of braided hoses which become taught when filled with fluid:
I found this solution really interesting and fun to work on, so I picked the pumps as the first real-time piece. A big challenge for me has been in considering real world use: Designing for repair procedures in and out of atmosphere/gravity, regular pump operation, etc. I hope in the end for this to feel like something that could plausibly exist.
If you've made it this far I appreciate your time and interest! As I mention above, this will be a small UE4 scene. While I'm not totally sure on composition yet, I'll leave you with the first doodle I did to that end:
Replies
Late night update:
Is there a reason you went with yellow as the main colour? I ask because the combination of yellow and the chunky style make it look more like underwater equipment rather than outer space equipment.
I'm keen to see how this goes because a while ago I started on a similarly themed project but had to abandon it. Hopefully you'll have more success!
To break down the whole functional design: Inside the housing that's part of the ship would be sort of like a rollercoaster lift hill, carrying the pump/tube assembly out/retracting them back in. During extension and before ejecting a pump, this mechanism can lock a pump in place and attach to the 6 open pipes you see in the latest render. Then it fills out to become rigid. This would allow the length of the repair ship from the work surface to change depending on what type of work needs to be done.
I started doodling with the fun idea of a "boat as a spaceship" actually, just to get better ideas flowing. The yellow stuck for a number of reasons. I think it's cool, familiar, and that it fits in with the design language I'm going for in this larger worldbuilding exercise. Only repair stuff will be a bright yellow, which helps work zones stick out in high traffic places such as a station with hundreds of ships arriving and departing every day. A bounding box around the station is something like 4 cubic miles of area, and the ships I eventually will depict can be anything from 2 miles long to not much bigger than a person.
I've gotten concerns over strong color on spaceships before. What I find is that when people see everything in scale it becomes a non-issue. That said, I'm still open on materials so I may revisit further down the line.
Thanks for the compliments both of you, I'm excited to polish this high poly off over the next few days!
EDIT:
Get it now for free here!
https://gumroad.com/l/vcolpush
I started learning Max Creation Graph as a means to get the braided cables on my pump appear inflated, but not self intersect like they previously did.
My custom Push modifier takes in vertex colors, in this case baked AO, and uses them as a weight on the push amount. There is also a gamma function to control the falloff of the weighting effect. Though I have no use for color atm, just black to white, the modifier has full color support which means I can optionally influence the direction of the push (aka each RGB channel of the vertex color independently weights the push for each XYZ component in a vertex's normal vector).
Below is the vertex color AO I baked.
And the modifier. Nice and simple.
It's not perfect by any means, but it looks a lot better IMO. I may revisit this using the raytracing scenes with MCG to prevent any and all self intersection.
Some updates:
I've gotten the cable motor group to a point I like and think I'm done with it. There's a proxy for a motor behind the gratings, not visible here tho:
Redid the braided hosing material and have modeled out its connection to the pump on one side so far. They aren't symmetrical:
Almost done modeling out the main radiator group:
I've also been doing some work on making edge sharpness presets so everything is consistent and quickly editable.
Next up is to get the top of the pump housing modeled including its latching door and top hose connections, finish out the other braid connection, and flesh out what's behind the sliding glass.
The original texture was a temp lifted from another project, and quilted look is very common for fabrics in space so it was my first avenue to explore. I'm not yet happy with this look. It lacks the dynamism the scrunched look had.
I've finished modeling out the top section, and have completely replaced the end caps with a new design. Not pictured, the control panel area is redesigned.
I have also successfully got a Marvelous Designer simulation of the braid working. This involved creating a morph target going from flat to braid like shown here:
Apologies for the large gif. I use this to get the fabric into the right structure and build out from there.
This is the final sim brought back into max, without displacement. It has a lot more interesting details and realistic intersection than before!
Most recently I've been transitioning to UE4 as I created an animated UI for the computer screen. This also shows some of the low poly work I've done but not all.
As well as beginning to work on inflating the braided cables within UE.
Many of the high poly meshes were recreated to be cleaner and more accurate to form, but design-wise the two interesting bits are the new rollers and screen door:
More progress. Got most of the low poly work done, uved and baked, as well as added a few of the higher end rendering features UE4 has to offer
Huge thanks to @ZombieDawgs for lending me his space dude to play with!