Putting Life On Hold - Development Of The Spaceship Cargo Hold

Struggling To Launch

So for a while now I have been spending a ton of hours developing concept art for a potential new TV show. For the most part I feel like I have been very productive. I am getting a lot of images done. But that progress sort of recently hit the skids. I generally use Corona Render in 3ds Max to render my images for this project. I have been doing a lot of the modeling in a program called Modo and have done some of the rendering in it.

The image above was rendered in the Modo production render and it came out pretty nice. I have had a little bit of a problem with some texture tearing which I think I finally figured out.

If you notice these images are all outside. So I have not had to rely much on global illumination to help light my scenes. But now I am trying to create a cargo bay and no matter what I have done in Modo whether using the native render or Vray the internal scenes have all come out so noisy that I don't even want to post an example. I was getting more and more frustrated. Because not only were the renders noisy but I could not find a look that I felt good about.

I have some time pressure on these project so I finally gave up trying to render the scenes in Modo and have imported the models back into 3DS Max and have started to use Corona because I know that much better and I just have to make progress. I am still struggling with the look of things. Finding an original look for scifi stuff can be challenging as there have been many many talented people producing this type of art for years.

I felt that the image above was some progress. The earlier versions did not have very good visual balance. The walls were way to busy for me and I am also getting sort of sick of most of my displacement textures. I have been looking at them like 20 hours a day. So I have been taking a lot of hits to my creativity.

Finally Some Progress

So I bit the bullet and stopped using Modo to render. I took a bit of a break today and that helped me a lot. I was getting to frustrated and some time away seems to have helped. I finally got the structure of the hold working or sort of working for me. I think the textures could still use some work but at least I am at the point where I can start to add props and quit working on the structure.

While I am not done refining textures on the structure I think that has a much cleaner look now. I am starting to put other things in the scene and for a while I am just going to concentrate on the embellishments. I do recognise that I am getting a little burn out but there is just so much to get done that I feel I should push ahead. Maybe if the sun is out tomorrow I will take some time and take a walk near the lakefront.

I Love Feedback

Stop by and let me know what you think. This is my first real concept art job and I can always use a fresh perspective. Thank you to those of you who follow me.