After Baron Harcombnen grew impatient with the spice yields he ordered his men to comb the desert fo
This is a passion project of mine mashing the Dune Universe with the Spaceballs Universe based on the two following concepts:
The basic premise was to redesign the spice harvester from Dune to look like a gigantic mechanical comb. I am not 100% satisfied with the end-result, but I feel like I have captured my original vision to some degree. Unfortunately due to hardware constraints I was unable to render the fluid sims I had for dust/smoke as even a low quality render with a volume depth of only 3 and low fluid samples was taking weeks. It's theoretically fully animatable and I have an animation of the treads further down.
The project is too complicated to go into specific details over everything with the main "Spice Harvester" consisting of hundreds of unique meshes but I will cover general topics for those who are curious. A quick note is that there were no assets used in the entire project with the single exception of the font on the comb which I collaborated with a dear friend on.
Spice Harvester - Modeled with hard-surface techniques in Autodesk Maya. All of the texturing was done procedurally with Arnold. I used the aiJitter (originally aiUtility connected to an aiRandom node, but aiJitter proved to be more reliable) to drive each of the shaders to allow micro-differences in color/roughness and to drive noise --> time. This enabled each individual object to look slightly different. Each of the primary shaders (glass, wire, main metal, shiny metal, dark metal) were combined with a sand shader using the aiMixShader for the end result. I had to simpifly my original network due to hardware constraints
Comb - Modeled with hard-surface techniques. Textured with an aiMixShader (the gold paint and the ebonite comb, ebonite took some research but I believe I got it roughly right with an IOR of 1.660 and a very high specular weight / low roughness)
Closeup Sand - This was by far the most troublesome and perhaps going forward I need to look into other methods of achieving the effect like Substance Designer but I am limited to my student license of Maya and Mudbox. It is a MASH network overlayed on top of a mesh modeled in Maya and then the track lines were sculpted over projected curves in Mudbox. I originally used the curve deformer, but it was lacking something and I resorted to sculpting the details although this was time consuming. The MASH network itself consists of 1,300,000 objects chosen at random from 20 low-poly sand grains I modeled. This is the part I consider to have turned out the best
Faroff sand - Modeled in Maya and then the tracklines were sculpted in Mudbox. Same problem as before with curve deformers not providing me with a good enough result. To shade the sand itself I utilized the sheen settings for the aiStandardShader with what felt like 1,000 tweaks.
Lighting - After a lot of deliberation I kept it simple an didn't cheat and just used the aiPhysicalSky. It left something to be desired in the end result and in hindsight maybe I should have taken more artistic license.
Here is the full spice harvester, you can only see a small part of it in the main render but I modeled it from every angle:
