Greetings all - just wanted to keep a thread on a project I’m working on to illustrate a story I’ll write someday. This post will have the latest render, and the subsequent posts the work-in-progress steps. Comments are welcome of course.
Latest render:
General comment/apology: the original renders are huge files, and they don’t seem to upload well here. I’ve downgraded them to jpgs, but higher-quality versions are available if anyone is interested.
Thanks for checking out the thread!
Looks good. I think the asteroid lets this render down quite significantly. I’d be interested in seeing the HQ versions. Have you tried uploading to Photobucket etc?
The original shape for the carcass of the station is based on Archimedean geometry. I used Wings3D briefly to solidify the frame, since it does a cleaner job than the Solidify modifier does. From there, it’s all Blender.
Here’s the starting shape:
This quick render was the starting point for refining, which I started by importing the render in SketchbookPro to sketch on top of:
The nice thing about SketchbookPro is that it has great pencil and blending tools. Gimp would work, but the blending tools are not great. The nice thing about layers is that you can sketch on top of the render infinitely, try things out, erase all the mistakes, and it’s all good.
I tweaked some of the ideas from my sketches, and broke the shape up into pieces that worked beautifully with the mirror modifier - all three axes! boo-yah! 
Early clay render:
Now a close-up so I can figure out the telescoping arm braces:
More SketchbookPro sketches on what it could look like. Took me quite a while and several false starts to come up with one that looked decent. Thank goodness pixel paint is free!
The middle bottom one had the most promise …
The telescoping arms are the “meat” of the station - they hold the asteroid in place while it is mined. It took a long time to figure out the armature, and design it in such a way that it could be copied to new locations and angles, and still work properly. Three segments telescope together, and the “foot” on the end rotates on a ball joint. After much failure and cursing, I finally nailed it.
Outside view of one arm in place:
Inside view:
Also started playing with materials, trying to get the metal panel effect with a subtle bump map. Mixing a glossy and diffuse shader for the station frame material, however, started getting me very grainy renders.
Adding multiple arms turned out to be way more than copy and paste. Each had its own armature, and that means array modifiers won’t work. There were lots of piddly details that failed upon copying and rotating, and that meant a lot of back-and-forth fixing.
With two arms:
An asteroid sample. This one is really meant to be seen from a distance, and not close up. I like the basic shape and color distribution, but the surface texture isn’t there yet. What I would love to be able to do is to turn off the bump map inside the craters using vertex groups, but I can’t figure out a way to do that. If someone out there has done something like that, I’d love to hear it. I want the inside walls of the craters to be smooth, as if filled with just powder. Anyway:
Putting the asteroid in for a placeholder for now, and added all the other arms, tweaked the materials and lighting:
Lighting a space scene is a compromise. On one hand, there is reality. Space is dark. The asteroid belt, where this station would be located, hardly gets any sun, and no backlighting at all. So, I cheated a bit and put a bluish backlight anyway. It looked awful without it.
The real problem now is fireflies and graininess. The surface that are directly sunlit only look fine. The surfaces that receive bounced light look awful, even with 1500 samples. Anyone with tips to try - I’d love to hear them. The materials are pretty simple mixes of glossy and diffuse shaders.
The background: pretty simple starfield from Nasa, with contrast bumped up to make the blacks look black. If anyone knows of a stash of better starfields, please post a link! 
I agree about the asteroid. It’s pretty much a placeholder for now - the future one I envision will have crawlers on it, eating away at it as it gets mined. Ultimately I would like it to look much more rocky and gravelly, since that’s what asteroids largely are - a cluster of rocks, barely held together by gravity.
I have not set up a Photobucket account - perhaps I will look into something like that; once the renders look a little cooler I can pop them on DeviantArt, which does not seem to have a size limitation, but is not really a work-in-progress forum. Will work on that.
I suspect that the soft asteroid regolith would cause those clamps to sink into the surface a little. You might also have some dust rising softly away from the drill location and form a sparse cloud in the low gravity. But that’s just a guess.
Not every asteroid is a rubble pile. Those with a more rapid rotation rate would fly apart if they were just loose debris.
@Wolfred I think you mean an asteroid field or belt. Solitary “rocks” are solid masses… if a cluster of rocks were moving through space they would drift apart and rotate differently than the rest.
I’m quite a ways from that level of detail - but I was more or less planning some kind of spiderweb mesh spun by mechs to contain the debris - otherwise the station would be a mess: the bits would just drift everywhere. There are several types of ships still to design and model that are going to be part of the whole process, too. Barges, tugs, spinners, tankers, etc. Lots to do still
True. Some are more solid. There was one in the news just recently that fell apart once it got closer to the sun - probably held together by some ice that melted. But yeah, the rotation just flung it apart. I think it comes down to how much heating they were exposed to long ago.
