Behind the Scenes: Alien Worlds – Jumpship over a tidally locked planet

Bounce into Samuel’s intricate workflow as he navigates varied sources and instruments to create his magnificent sci-fi piece of artwork.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

Hello, I’m Samuel Pantze from Germany, and Blender has been my fundamental inventive outlet for the previous 5 years. I studied mechatronics engineering, however then determined that I’d relatively wish to turn out to be a scientist, so I began a PhD in laptop science in early 2023, the place I now write VR software program to investigate multidimensional microscopy photographs. It seems that figuring out the right way to use Blender proves fairly useful for my PhD undertaking, permitting me to create fast 3D mock-ups, simulate datasets, or prototype shaders and lighting.

I took my first child steps in Blender again in 2017 after I joined a bunch of passion sport builders I met on-line. They wanted somebody to do the texturing, in order that’s what I discovered first. Ultimately, the irresistible pull of Blender led me to find out about its different options as effectively. Evidently, that sport we had been engaged on by no means got here to fruition, however since then I’m hooked on this superb piece of open-source software program.

INSPIRATION

I’ve at all times been an enormous fan of the whole lot associated to sci-fi and house. My bookshelf is piling over with books from Arthur C. Clarke, Stanislaw Lem, Pierce Brown, John Scalzi, Dan Simmons, Isaac Asimov, and so forth. One other supply of inspiration is the movies from John D. Boswell, higher often called Melodysheep. His skill to weave science, 3D artwork, and self-composed soundtracks into these masterfully crafted movies is really unmatched. Lastly, I wish to point out the attractive idea artwork from Paul Chadeisson; he’s extremely expert at conveying a way of scale in his scenes.

The concept for this specific undertaking was sparked in March 2024 when the theme for the month-to-month render problem on the Blender Discord server was introduced as “Alien Worlds.” I’d watched each the TV present Basis and the film The Creator a couple of days earlier and knew I’d must mannequin a spaceship paying homage to both the Basis jumpships or the Nomad house station from The Creator.

However what world can be alien sufficient to fulfill the subject of the problem? Because of certainly one of Melodysheep’s movies, I used to be made accustomed to the idea of tidally locked planets. Most of these planets rotate round themselves on the identical charge as their orbit across the Solar. In consequence, the identical facet will at all times be dealing with the solar, inflicting it to warmth up. The darkish facet of the planet shall be equally hostile to life attributable to its freezing temperatures. However there could also be planets which can be liveable simply across the twilight zone between searing warmth and everlasting darkness.

So, the aim was clear: I wished to mannequin a spaceship with a bounce drive over a tidally locked planet. Now I simply had to attract the remainder of the owl…

PROCESS

My scene is made up of two main parts: the spaceship and the planetary background. However earlier than I dive into the intricacies of mentioned background (spoiler: it’s all carried out with vector math), let’s concentrate on the boring half first: the right way to mannequin a spaceship.

Spaceship: Modeling

Taking a look at different individuals’s spaceship fashions and having modeled a couple of myself earlier than, I discovered the next issues:

There may be at all times a hierarchy of shapes: the very fundamental fundamental form of the ship comes first. Tough geometric particulars then break up the straightforward form and add element and performance. Finer geometric particulars then assist add a way of scale (suppose tiny turrets or pipes to point an enormous ship). And solely after you may have all these element layers applied do you have to begin worrying about texture particulars.
Be aware of the element density. There must be a visible steadiness between comparatively flat surfaces (apart from panel creases right here and there) and extremely structured or cluttered areas. On a spaceship hull, the flat areas may be regarded as shielding panels, and the detailed areas are the place these panels reveal the underlying construction, made up of pipes, engines, docking ports, radiators, weapons, and so forth.
Proper angles and even sharper angles are unlawful; as a substitute, break the perimeters with a bevel or use a subdivision floor modifier.
Deal with the areas the place gentle and shadow meet. That’s the place you wish to break up edges which can be too clear to create a extra fascinating shadow terminator. In areas with much less visible weight, you is usually a bit sloppier.
Rule of thumb: In case your mannequin seems to be detailed with out making use of any textures, you’re good.

I like the Random Flow addon for including high quality particulars, particularly for dividing a big space into smaller panels. I additionally depend on the nice outdated JSplacement textures to make use of as hull textures and to make use of as mesh displacement for the ultra-fine particulars:

Since these textures all have kind of orthogonal particulars, it is necessary to not stretch them an excessive amount of when mapping them onto your mannequin. That’s why I put particular consideration on having quad circulate in my base mesh.

I began out by brainstorming the place to place the bounce drive. I wished it to be an enormous ring, much like the jumpships from Basis, but in addition not a downright copy of their stand-up design. I made a decision to place the drive on the rear of the ship after which mannequin the ship round it with a really tough form utilizing a easy subdivision floor modifier. To hurry issues up, I solely modeled 1 / 4 of the ship and mirrored it each horizontally and vertically. This labored effectively as a result of the entire ship has a really flat design.

After making use of that modifier, I ended up with a fairly good quad circulate already. I then added one other subdivision floor modifier so as to add particulars and refine the circulate of the sleek surfaces. I broke the smoothness right here and there with sharp edges to create contrasting floor options.

Now that I had the essential form and tough particulars fleshed out, I went on so as to add smaller particulars. I modeled the rear of the ship with some house for typical engines in thoughts; how else would our ship be capable of journey inside the star system? After taking part in round with rotational symmetry for a bit, I discovered the conical form that I had imagined, and the array modifier took care of the remainder:

As soon as that was carried out, I moved on to shielding the ship from radiation with my trusty buddy, the Random Circulation addon. I chosen particular person islands from the primary mesh and performed round with the random panel generator. To do that, I needed to make a replica of the bottom mesh first and apply the subdivision modifier in order that the generator had adequate underlying mesh decision to work with.

Subsequent up: including element to the perimeters. First, I scattered random cubes alongside the perimeters with, you guessed it, Random Circulation:

So as to add extra curiosity to the perimeters, I added pipes, arrayed shapes (radiators?), spherical shapes (docking ports?), weapons, structural components, and different random doodads. The edges had been supposed to point out the interior workings of the ship, in any case.

Spaceship: Textures

With all of the geometry in place, it was time to maneuver on to the supplies. I discussed JSplacement textures above; for these unfamiliar with JSplacement, it was a freeware for producing tiled textures by randomly splatting rectangles and different shapes over one other. Very helpful for including shade element to surfaces or utilizing displacement maps. The software program is not obtainable for obtain, however you may obtain related results with the free web-based Displacement X instrument or through the use of the SciFi Flex addon.

I combined a few of these textures collectively, added slight shade variations and roughness particulars with random noise, after which used the ambient occlusion node so as to add grime build-up within the nooks and crannies. I duplicated this materials and created a darker variant of it to create alterations on the hull. For the perimeters, I selected a special kind of JSplacement texture that consisted primarily of arrayed spots and turned it into tiny emissive window lights.

The glow of the bounce drive was created by merely placing a gradient texture on a aircraft and mixing in a warped noise texture for particulars.

For the reason that daylight hit the highest of the hull at a really flat angle, I felt that it might use a bit extra geometric element that casts shadow. So I upped the subdivision ranges of the hull and added mesh displacement to the supplies. The outcome shouldn’t be good, but it surely was adequate for my use case.

This concludes the boring spaceship half. Let’s transfer on to the shader magic.

The Planet Background

The issue with planets is that they’re fairly massive, at the very least in comparison with spaceships. Earth has a diameter of a bit over 12,700 km, and the biggest human-built vessel is a cruise ship with round 0.36 km in size (the ISS is simply a meager 109 m). Even when we assume our spaceship to be 1 km in size, we’d have to suit an object over ten thousand occasions that measurement into the identical scene. So what most individuals do is solely create a sphere that appears sufficiently big, place it someplace within the distance, apply both a procedural texture or a planet texture they discovered on-line, after which add volumetrics to create an environment and clouds.

This method often works effectively, but it surely has a few caveats. First: scale. That is much less necessary when rendering nonetheless photographs, however when animating, parallax from planets which can be too small can rapidly make the scene look unrealistic. And second: volumetrics. Whereas they do present correct gentle modeling of the environment, they’re fairly sluggish to compute, and particularly once you get near the planet, it actually takes perpetually to render good volumetric clouds (as a result of it requires a small quantity step measurement). Not even speaking about rendering animations at this level; and never everybody owns an RTX 4090.

For these causes I had the thought of another method: why not use shader math to create a planet on the earth shader? This is able to resolve the scaling drawback (the HDRI is at all times infinitely far-off), and it wouldn’t require volumetrics in any respect. We’d additionally get world illumination from it free of charge, even in Eevee. The draw back: all volumetric results must be modelled manually. However I’ve at all times been a fan of challenges, so I gave it a attempt anyway.

Since my aim was to create a scene near the environment, I began out by discovering a coordinate system transformation that may flip the spherical mapping of the world shader into one thing resembling a flat floor in perspective.

That is what the coordinate system seems to be like by default:

And after a easy remodel, it seems to be one thing like this:

After masking out the highest half and shifting it a bit downwards, I slowly began to get the impact I wished:

(Disclaimer: The maths right here doesn’t correspond to what really occurs once you undertaking a sphere in perspective onto a aircraft. The aim was merely to make it look believable. I just lately picked up the node graph for this shader once more and began implementing a extra correct approach of projecting spheres onto planes.)

The falloff didn’t really feel proper but, so I performed round with totally different energy values till I obtained one thing nearer to what I had in thoughts:

Subsequent, I created a shadow gradient (not with gradient textures however through the use of the feel coordinates themselves by working them by means of energy features):

This gradient would show helpful in two methods: first, I might use it for the precise shadow, and second, I might use it as a mixture issue for the terrain, permitting me to go from a scorching dry terrain over a lush inexperienced zone to an icy blue terrain. (Truly, the masks can also be helpful for modelling different results like Rayleigh scattering and the sundown glow of clouds).

I combined a couple of present procedural planet textures I’d created for an earlier undertaking and ended up with a terrain like this:

To create the outer environment, I used the Z texture coordinate and ran it by means of an exponential falloff:

In a similar way, I created a falloff masks for the interior atmospheric layer:

For the clouds, I additionally used present procedural cloud patterns and combined them collectively.

I packaged each the terrain and cloud setup into their very own teams so I might reuse them anyplace within the node graph. To create the cloud shadows, I merely needed to duplicate the cloud group and transfer its coordinates a bit to at least one facet. It turned out that the bump node didn’t work in generated coordinate house on the earth shader, so I wrote my very own (in all probability extremely inefficient) bump mapping, which I then used to present depth to the clouds and to paint them with a sundown glow:

After combining all the consequences collectively and sprinkling a couple of small extras on high (like glowing lava cracks on the shadow facet and a procedural starfield), I ended up with this planet:

Within the course of, I created this monstrosity of a node graph (which is simply the topmost hierarchy; it solely covers coordinate conversion, mixing the totally different textures collectively, and creating the atmospheric impact):

Or in different phrases

On the flip facet, the whole lot has a parameter and it’s fairly straightforward to tweak the look of the ultimate HDRI:

Put up-processing

I used the Flared addon to create delicate lens flares for a number of the renders. The remainder of the post-processing was carried out in Affinity Photograph, which is my modifying program of selection these days.

The uncooked TIF render appeared like this:

After making use of a little bit of a bloom impact, a LUT, some curve corrections, and a delicate grade, I ended up with the ultimate photographs under!

RENDER: Alien Worlds – Jumpship over a tidally locked planet

And that’s how I modelled a jumpship and created a fever dream of a node graph. I hope I gave you overview of my workflow and look ahead to your ideas and suggestions!

Concerning the Artist

Samuel Pantze is a Blender hobbyist targeted on proceduralism, generative artwork, and sci-fi. He works as a pc scientist in coaching and sells procedural Blender instruments on Blender Market.