Behind The Scenes: Space Colony (Patreon)

Let's occupy mars and switch the script a bit!

But before I share my recent project insights, I want to mention my new course, Arcane House - Blender 3D Textured Environment Course.

There's a simple reason for this.

If you like some of my textured environments I shared recently in my behind the scenes articles, like this space colony illustration, all of them use the same exact techniques and principles I teach in my new course.

So if you want to make something like this yourself, it's a perfect match!

And it's available now with EARLYBIRD code for a 20% discount

And now, let's put our helmets on!

Space Colony Illustration

I was a bit out of inspiration lately, all of the latest pop-culture good stuff was spent. The Last of Us, Mandalorian, I made it all. In cases like that, I like to revert to some vanilla ideas an themes. 

You can always go wild west, ancient temples, high fantasy, sci-fi, space stuff, you name it. And although at this point, I probably visited all of these in my illustrations, they were all different in style and finish. So I went ahead and explored some of my older works and came across a Martian colony diorama.

It wasn't flat shaded low poly, but wasn't fully textured and detailed either and I really wanted to make something similar again in more details. And that feeling of "want" is really something I'm looking for, when I plan to commit several hours of my time to a project.

Visit the full Pinboard here

Most of the time, I go and search for references first to find some ideas and layouts, that would work well for the project, but this time I took a little bit different approach.

I had pretty good idea of how I wanted the details and surfaces of the colony buildings and equipment to look, but if you don't have unlimited time for the material factoring, you need to go with the library materials. I use Substance library and even though it's pretty solid, it's still limited.

So I first searched for suitable materials with the space and sci-fi themes, that I could use in the design. I found a few good textures and trim sheets to choose from, so I gathered their screenshots on my PureRef board and only then searched for some space base ideas, that would match the materials I gathered.

After getting all of the resources in one place, I got my notebook and started to think about the layout. Made few preliminary layout sketches until I settled on very interesting interlaced building layout, that I saw on one of the reference images.

I added some auxiliary equipment to balance out the composition and added a cargo box, that was directly inspired by a shuttle cargo material from the library. Also, the solar panels made of hexagonal components were directly inspired by a texture set from Substance.

Sometimes, flipping your approach might work for the better result and getting inspired by a material instead of a finished scene or a photo can be equally powerful.

You can watch the process video on Youtube