Landing on Planet

 

                                                                      Landing on Planet

Hello and welcome to what became the most challenging piece of Blender work I have created so far.  

This was a commission and that is what stretched me as I could not give up when things got challenging. If I had known how big this project would get I would have probably passed.  The reward was all the new stuff I learned along the way.  I wanted to do it as I knew it would push me out of all the lowpoly work I have done and towards realisim.  The other big draw was   ... its space. 

It started off with a storyboard.

Then a landscape which I ended up modeling as I needed some specific features.  It had to be not identifyable as Moon or Mars. 

Planet Landscape

For the planet scene I used the resource made available by NASA  https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4720.  Changed up the colour a little. 

Moon Shot

Next were the vehicles of which there ended up being 3.  

The lander had to have a few moving parts and I would have done a proper rig on it in hindsight but it ended up being  wheels parented and a driver on each wheel.  

Lander rigging

The next vehicle was the cleanup vehicle.  This had to have a few specific features so I made it to order.  On this one I did rig the wheels as the vehicle had to move in circles.  I used rigacar to rig all 6 wheels. http://digicreatures.net/articles/rigacar.html .  This is a fantastic addon with great instructions.  I had not used it before but it was great and easy to animate using a follow path modifier.   The big disappointment on this vehicle was the laser.  I wanted to use a different approach to render but rendering time was limited so I went with a basic solution.  

Clean up Vehicle

The final vehicle was the spaceship which was deliberately non descript.  It was a simple design.  The dificulty on it was adding  the smoke and heat.  This all ended up being parented.

Space ship landing

Thats a summary of the major assets.  

I will go through some of the more complex effects in the next installment.  If there is something in particular you would like to know more about drop a note on Twitter. I am planning on creating some YouTube videos to go in more depth on those.