MDS REEL 2009 – Modelling and texturing
My reel depicts a scene of the transport starship “Amanzi” that is shipping water from one planet to another.
The captain of the ship is attempting to diagnose a problem with a faulty star chart, while the engineer is relaxing having a lunch break at one of the control consoles.
This scene was inspired a great deal by my love of science fiction, and I’ve brought together and taken reference from many of my favourite movies, television shows and video games. ‘Sunshine’, a scifi film directed by Danny Boyle that came out in 2006 became the precursor to my interest in 3d artwork, and I have used reference from the film to help design my scene, this can be seen in the shape of the console station and layout of the monitors. Several other nods to various shows and films are dotted around the scene, such as Firefly, Stargate and even Back to the Future (Roads? Where this starship is going, we don’t need ‘roads’). There are personal details too, a holographic image of my family’s dog is on the right console, and the designs of the characters are modelled after my father and I. Since I had put in things I love into the scene, I created some things for the captain character that my own father likes, note the mounted fish and fishing flys in the captain’s beret.
One of my main goals in creating this scene was to keep away from unrealistic detail, it is easy enough to throw in a pipe or a dozen knobs and switches to fill in some blank space, but often having these filler props in unusual places just doesn’t make sense. So I took a good look at actual space shuttle cockpits and saw how they were laid out, this helped me to create a sense of realism in the layout of the consoles. I want them to look like they could be used, not just a jumbled mess of buttons and screens.
I’ve truly loved working on this project, and I can’t wait to get working on my next one.