Hey Everyone,
Sorry for the big post but I realized this week that it’s been WAY too long since I last dug in and actually did something substantial so this weekend I started work on a short film (3mins) in Blender called “Into the Wild”. The elevator pitch (short short version) is that we follow a woman called Morgan as she releases her childhood pet back into the wild. But the wild is no ordinary wild and her pet is no ordinary pet…
First thing I always start with is the music, I’ve stitched together some suitably epic soundtrack music from AudioJungle.com. It’s still very rough, and you’ll have to mentally block out the nice lady saying AudioJungle repeatedly as I haven’t bought the tracks (yet). But even at this early stage, you can hear the pace and the emotion of the story…
[ Listen to the ROUGH draft here ]
So the clip starts with Morgan walking across a dark cargo bay then catching a lift up to the bay doors in the roof. On the way she releases Levi from her amulet (for the last time 
). At the top Bri (the pilot) opens the doors revealing the “Tree of Stars” in all its glory, and Morgan has to find a way to convice Levi to leave. Fortunately Bri was able to find a school of Levis kind swimming in the stellar tides which helps…
Ok, so the first bit of 3D work to show is the background environment for the story. In my story, ships travel - actually, sail - between stars using a network of wormholes called “The tree of stars”. The environment inside the tree of stars resembles the open sea inside a giant tube and while I’m using a strong orange color scheme below the idea is that different regions have different color schemes. (Apologies to anyone who’s already seen this in the Blender Tests subforum).
Scale wise relatively in the scene above, the ship will be about the size of the speaker icon in the youtube playback controls. The tree of stars itself is actually just a simple tube with a wave modifier and some noise based bump maps. JackBlack suggested the ocean simulator, so if I can get that working with a cylindrical mesh I might be able to get it looking even better 
The next bit of progress that I spent all today working on was Morgans amulet :
And for the last bit of show and tell, I’m actually going to cheat and pull up some old renders from an old starship project (I’ve posted a few of these around here a while back). But I figure it’s ok, because I finally get to use it in something
Here is a viewport snapshot of my ship (which you may or may not have seen before)
This is the bridge, I’m pretty happy with it, it just needs the pilot (Bri) and some floaty blue glowy HUD stuff…
Here’s the living area up behind the bridge. Needs some furniture…
Here’s where I’ve been having a bit of fun I’ve been blocking out the floorplan for the Discovery…
But for Into the Wild I only need the cargo bay (top middle) where Morgan releases Levi and the bridge (first on the left) where Bri opens the cargo bay doors for Morgan.
So Yay
Next part, Morgan and Levi. I’ll be modelling Morgan from Mena Suvari references and Levi from, well, the amulet above 
If Morgan takes too long though I might just switch over to a Daz3D character for times sake.
