Entries for Kitbash3D Mission to Minerva challenge for Concept Art / still images category using the provided asset pack, scenes assembled in Blender and rendered in Cycles. Featuring original assets and new ones made by kitbashing parts from the original.
I usually want to have everything (or at least 90%+) objects in a scene or project to be fully made by myself (despite my mediocre level of modeling), so using assets from other sources for large parts of the scene always made me feel somehow conflicted. Reading the rules that the minimum used assets from the provided pack is only one asset, my first idea was to use only some assets and the rest will be self-made. However, I then thought about kitbashing the asset into a new one. Started with the cargo ship, and soon became addicted, did more kitbashing, and finally forgot about making self-made assets. It was fun though! Modifications on the kitbashed units mostly included trimming/deleting of some parts/geometry and reassigning some materials particularly glass changed to opaque materials. Here are the kitbashed assets (and their original asset part names) :
Cargo Ship :
Radar Station :
Generator (land) :
Tower :
Fighter Escort :
Mothership :
Generator (orbit) :
Originally I only thought of submitting one image/render, but as I then found out that multiple submissions are allowed and there are still some time left, I then attempted to make another scenes. The second render was a different version of a previous one :
Didn’t want to detail those dinosaurs bones too much so discarded it, and didn’t fully satisfied with the new one actually, but wanted to feature fighter escorts so badly. Meanwhile, the third/last one featuring a mothership in orbit ended up being the one that I liked the most, also the one with the largest kitbashed assets included, so it worth the additional works. Might not get this far should I only submitted that one first render.
The journey itself isn’t too pretty actually. When starting with the kitbash pack I had trouble to even opening the 3GB+ input files that made me thought of just giving up as there is significant discrepancy between my rig and the recommended settings. Eventually though, I decided to keep going through as I then managed to attempted some workaround such as :
- Appending or linking assets individually/per asset group instead of opening the input file directly and save them as separate blend files to be appended or linked to other scenes or files later on. I also made simple render (actually just sceenshots of viewport render) to help preview the assets for later uses. The original assets have been nicely named and parented to an empty object so it’s easy to select certain groups.
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Reducing file size and resolution of the textures from 2K to 1K using batch converter (I used FileMinimizer). Format retained in PNG as converting to JPG would confuse the ‘Find Missing Files’ command in Blender (I used that command a lot since the kitbashed units are placed in different folders than the original one so texture files location had to be adjusted, and definitely not gonna do it one by one for dozens of textures).
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For scenes that contain many assets, rendering can also be done in separate phases such as for foreground and background elements/assets individually and combined later in post production.
Even using those methods there are sometimes ‘out of memory’ warning and hard resets as I overestimated or misjudged it. After working for long hours, closing and restarting the files or Blender can help clearing the memory and allowed me to work faster than the previous session (I lost count of how many times I spent time to browse for cat/kitten videos or reading SCP Foundation pages while waiting the scene to load/refresh…).
I admit that due to the limitations above combined with time constraint and my own ablilities, there are still many things that can be done better. The story itself might not be too clear as it was made on the go while I was kitbashing the assets, could have been better if had been planned first in the beginning. Honestly I enjoyed kitbashing the assets more than assembling the scenes. Nevertheless, I’m glad to have it finally finished, and I hope you enjoy them too. Big thanks to Kitbash3D for providing the great original assets and for hosting the challenge, also to anyone for reading this lengthy post.
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