Alien/bird environment (Patreon)

I was really struggling to figure out what the hell this place should even look like. A few times I tried to get inspiration for a design I liked better. I figured maybe the magic of AI would be able to come up with something cool. But trying stuff containing like "sci-fi bathroom", "alien bathroom" or "y2k bathroom" (I think trying "locker room" or "shower" but one of those was blocked by Bing image creator) gives results that, imo, are quite boring.

Like none of these are awful but nothing strikes me as stuff I couldn't find when googling for inspiration. I'm sure maybe other image generators might come up with something neater but I didn't want to waste my time rolling the dice for the machine to make a cool pic.

So, I put that off and figured I'd try to come up with something better eventually. I've been working on other stuff and I still couldn't think of an environment design and like... this animation was going to need a finalized environment very soon so I can start rendering. One of my ideas was "what if there were little half circles with shower heads on a wall" but it sucks.

Then after googling for some pics that might be inspirational (y2k architecture, y2k bathroom, etc...) I stumbled across pics of Lenny Kravitz Miami house from 99.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CZ7vQGPPOWi/ 

These two images in particular started me on a path thinking "the alien locker room shower needs more chrome" and from the beginning I was also thinking "I want there to be pipes, but not regular looking pipes."

Combining these two ideas made me think "what if they were shiny, kind of square pipes" and after some experimenting, I figured out I could use the skin modifier, a bevel modifier for the verts (to get those smooth curves) and a bevel modifier for the geometry (to get that square shape with subdivision surface).

Sometimes it's not about starting an idea over from the beginning but trying to find the right pieces to make the existing thing works... something I'm trying to learn how to recognize better. I think with the super shiny pipes, this environment finally has a sleek, alien, futuristic feel while also not feeling barren and empty.

Also, I add some displacement maps to the alien's balls (some subtle wrinkles) and I redid the bird's displacement map on his junk. Before I was trying to use the method I've done in the past of having a mirrored mesh subdivided and then shrink wrapped to a more detailed version of the junk but it was causing problems this time around so I applied the mirror and re-did the displacement texture. I think it looks pretty good!

I also fixed the shines on the bird's eyes, it's using an empty tracking to the center of  the eye it's shining on. Had to touch it up manually in a lot parts because the squash/stretch on the head region deforms the geometry, not the position of anything (so the shine would look weird in some cases)

The alien I don't know if he needs eye shines. So for now, I'm not going through the trouble of adding them.

I attached a viewport render with just the junk so I could quickly get a better idea of what it'll look like in the final render (be warned though, this is the melon bread version of the characters :p)

I think I'm ready to finally start rendering this thing.