Second Year Summer: Maya to Nuke Workflow
For this project I wasted to further develop my skills with texturing and taking render passes into nuke to amplify the style
I modelled and textured the ship focusing on trying to make lower poly model look high quality this asset is designed to be seen in the far to mid ground, the ship was broken down into sections then mirrored to efficiently finalise the model.
I then took it into substance painter where I first textured the ship clean, without damages and grime, then added all the extra details using references of real world planes to look at dust smears and fuel leaks further influencing the design.
It is important to highlight that the inspiration behind the ship was formed from a series of concept art and game art taken from the internet
Ship Maya Render
The ship was designed to be a military cargo ship it has a few weapons to defend itself however its main role was hauling munitions and ground troops to the battlefield. It comes equipped with four high calibre guns on its wings and two sets of two rapid fire guns. It also sports hover fans to help aid its in agility this ship has been designed to withstand space and atmosphere flight.
With all this to consider I wanted to create a unique looking ship that would also be able to fly.
I knew that I wanted to render the emissive layer separately and work on it in nuke so I made sure to texture the lights as off in the base material.
Probe Maya Render
This probe was made during the nuke development stage of the project as I wanted to make the shot feel more dynamic therefore I experimented with a robot that would be searching for the ship and asses its damage I decided to have the robot be a large searchlight with a medial logo on the side. I also experimented with the AIAtmosphere Material inside maya to get a nice search beam, unfortunately needing much higher render settings to produce a quality image. I spent lots of time working on the animation for this robot as it would be what the eye follows I tried to give it "personality" darting like real eyes from part to part of the ship
Emissive Layer
I wanted to make the emissive layer pop more make it seem like it was actually glowing, I first needed to only target the blue lights so I used a keylight node to remove the yellow light of the probe.
I then masked the emissive layer in the merge pipeline using a noise node to give it a flickering on and off effect to show that the ship was damaged or something was wrong with it.
I lastly needed to bring the probes light back so all i did was invert the keylight and merged that channel back into the shot, I also made sure to grade the base layer in a way to make it look like the lights were off so when the emissive layer would be placed over it it would flicker correctly
Background and Lens Effects
The background was a HDRI rendered from Maya, the HDRI was taken from Space Spheremaps
​
After comping the background in I added motion blur, a soft lens flare and some lens dirt. Once happy with the composite I sent the shot over to Georgia Crooks, A colourist at futureworks who produced the final grade
Evan Goddard