Thanks for the comment.
Our little blog is up and running, you can read a little background about the universe we are trying to create.
Concept art for some indigenous life in a galaxy far away…
Concept Bio: http://letsmakeafilm.com/?page_id=82
Great so far. Very professional, I will watch this thread.
for the grav drive you could put it inside the craft (much like a warp drive) then you could have plots on stealing it. BTW how are you going to get passed the light speed problem?
Thank you! We’ll keep updating regularly.
Thankfully, we don’t have to fully work that out for this short, all the action is planetside. But we have discuused this topic a lot, and we have lots of ideas in this department. We decided that a short is no place to be describing unfamiliar or new technology though. We’ll leave that to your imagination :).
The Fandango team has decided to suspend this notion (at a minimal for the time being). All the same, I’ve copied the gravity drive concept to my website with the notion I will do something much more with it in the future.
I suspect there may be a neat way to bend or blend the Schrödinger Wave equation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schroedinger_Wave_Equation with some Quantum Mechanics to make for a nice plausible effect.
The notion that a ship could propell through space as a particle & a wave sounds kinda like a fun thing to play with conceptually. I’m just not sure it’s all that interesting to people, may not matter, I had fun writing it… though maybe not worth it if there isn’t an audience for it.
i like the wave thing 
id like to help but i have no idea how
Well This is about the best I’m going to do for a while lol. New rocks set up with little more detail and I hope
Consideringthepickle Will be happy I hope XD.
Awesome work there. Can’t wait for more updates!
-thondal-
Wow. Consideringthepickle is definitely happy with the new rocks.
The atmospheric effect over on the right is really nicely done too.
The only thing now is really the color of the rocks which seems to be the same color as the sand. That could be what you’re aiming for, a really sand weathered rock outcropping, but even just splotches of greys or browns or any other colors would really make it look cool.
Great job with the rocks though. Did you use sculpting or a normal mapped texture or both? I may need to hit you up for sand texture advice too. It’s simple but it looks like it gets the job done.
We are so happy you like it. AFAIK these rocks are completely un-textured, Levi has only just finished sculpting them. Had to post this color corrected render, really getting some good detail.
Attachments
@Levisarts-
Very nice, however you may want to play with the shadow bias settings for the large rock face, and probably reduce the detail of the foreground rock, it’s kind of a waste of resources.
unless that’s a normal map, in which case, kudos to you!
The rock face needs a small detail bump or normal map (voronoi F2 clouds would probably work well) and it also needs an epic texture to match the epic modeling. :yes:
edit:@3dementia-
I think that’s a bit overdone 
Agreed. :o couldn’t help myself. Good to see you, Tug.
Ah, okay. I look forward to seeing this finished scene. Are you using the rocks to render out matte backdrops? It seems like this is going to have a pretty big render time per frame.
just my $.02 again-
Consideringthepickle has a good point, however, unless the camera is stationary, a matte won’t work very well.
Instead, you could consider baking the highpoly mesh onto a lowpoly one, including the lighting, setting the lowpoly mesh shadeless, and probably using some alpha trickery to make the edges look better.
That should allow for some camera movement, even if not very much.
I’m not really clear whether the team is open or closed, but if you want, I could help out here and there, maybe with some background props or something.
Rendering is a big part of our current discussions, we plan to go quite high poly, so keeping things seperated on layers, linking and working with proxies, plus compositing are all going to have a big part in accomplishing this vision. Recently we have discussed gpu accelerated render engines, currently hoping that they develop quickly enough to be stable by the time we get ready to render.
Edit: @spacetug thanks for the two cents, now we are up to a dime! (I’ll send you a pm)
We will definitely be linking the camera in and rendering the bg’s seperately, but I expect them to be fully modeled, no traditional matte painting work, all 3d.
The rock is a large file. 4mil pollys. But it renders out pretty fast, about 3 min per frame. I was thinking I would use it as a clean plate. Then cut out the foreground and have the actors work on the foreground with a green screen basically. Render the mountain scene by itself then use the same camera data to shoot the foreground scene.Then rotoscope and key it in, in after effects. Just a thought.
Working the peod up a little more. Just wanted to show concept build up. This is a NOT COMPLETE 3D model (yes, no arms, feet, etc… not done… very low poly at this point). 
Model sheet (should you care to see some poor sketch work):
http://letsmakeafilm.com/MiscFiles/Peod%20Reference%20Sheet2.png
3D model:
