This a futuristic station on Titan, the biggest Saturn’s moon.
This is a kind of “proof of concept” I am doing: Making most of it with geometry nodes for procedural modeling. I already learned a lot making my own nodes from scratch.
Windows and their lights are missing, and everything in the background needs to be done. No textures and basic shader work. That Blade Runner 2049 look happened mostly when I quickly edit renders on photoshop to make this post. It works pretty well but I am still looking for the right look of Titan, that would be darker because of its very thick atmosphere.
Hello, here is an update. This is another view from another scene of the same project.
I’m working on this scene in parallel because that’s what it’s all about: making a concept art that shows the human colonization of Titan.
The architectural and natural elements will all come from the scene above. The composition is set, the cube on the left will be of course at the end a human walking on top of a hill overlooking this valley. As you can see the atmosphere on the surface of Titan will be quite dark, it is not dark enough yet
All the buildings and pipelines will be generated by geometry nodes as in the first post. I’ve made good progress in this area but I’m not quite done with the big buildings yet.
I’ve made some progress on the architecture, here are a few screenshots to show the principles. I use material indexes to define on the model what kind of nodes go where. It’s quite long to set up all nodes because the general size or a different context might require local adjustements. The whole thing is challenging with the many levels to manage, from simple nodes to larger nodes groups, procedual objects, geometry nodes, instances, objects, shaders, hierachies and collections. I have to pay a special attention to naming and nomenclature in order to keep the scene clean.
Learning a lot about Blender and the control of the result is worth the effort.
Here are the latest renders, I have the look I was looking for the general atmosphere. The architecture design could be better. Next time, right now it’s pretty basic and blocky to make it work.
I’m thinking of a supporting structure on the outside and the living parts on the inside. While keeping the idea of piles dug into the icy ground, the weak gravity is not an obstacle to building at height.
I could add some kitbashing, characters, textures to propose a more accomplished illustration. But this is time consuming and goes beyond the initial intention of pushing the procedural modelling as much as possible. I’ll move on to the other image now.
I really like The Expanse series, both the books and the TV series. I think it’s the first time a science fiction series has really looked at our solar system, not just as a setting but as real places. It explores what it will be like when colonised by humans, and all that implies in a long history of political, technological and social evolution. We believe it and that’s what’s great about it.
Anyway, at one point Holden says he’s considering retiring to Titan.
I then wondered what the habitat on Titan might be like. Well, it sounds like a strange place to spend your old age.
Titan is a bigger moon than ours with a very thick atmosphere, so the view can’t be much further than a few dozen metres. Not sure if the weak sunlight reaches the surface(?). It’s a ball of methane and hydrocarbon ice around -100 C at the surface. And finally there is no magnetosphere to protect it from cosmic radiation. In short, it is far from being a hospitable place.
This could be fan-art for The Expanse. I really had it in mind when I was doing it. So I added my Belter ship the Shikata Na Nai, you’ll see it next time.
I haven’t added much detail and it’s not really textured. It will be seen mostly in the thick Titan haze. By the way, I’ll have to find a way to make the haze less uniform than the basic volume shader. (advice is welcome!) The halo effects around the light sources will be done with photoshop.
Now I’m going to do the architectures: the villa, the casino and the housing units.
Thanks, it’s already better than the noise tests I did before, but it’s hard to adjust. I’m looking for the right projection. A bit of photoshop at the end will probably help.
