Designing the Environment

Initial Concepts

I had a rough idea of how I wanted my environment to look, but I'm not very skilled at drawing perspective or lighting, so I thought it would be more advantageous to block out the environment in Maya even though I planned to Matte paint the background for my shots. The rough concept was the inside of the ship was to hint at a camera lens and be quite cylindrical, but have lumps breaking through from the outside of the ship, as if the ship were constantly being built from materials gathered. The Alien has been stealing camera's so there is evidence of this with piles of cameras against the wall. This'll hopefully make it a little clearer what the Alien is after.

By putting transparent images on plates of Jeff and the Alien I could roughly work out shots in the blocked-out Maya file, this allowed me to move the 'important' aspects into shot. I decided to render out different aspects of the structure in different render layers to then edit in Photoshop and add to After Effects, in hindsight I probably shouldn't have rendered out as many, as I only ended up moving a few bits in my comp. For example I rendered close up shots and different angles and perhaps would have coloured them too but due to time ended up manipulating the matte-paintings I'd already created.

I then painted the layers, which, though compliment the 'painted' look of the Alien was quite time consuming and I think look a little flat, despite my overlaying of textures on them.

front

back

side

 To add movement and a little detail I wanted some sort of circular wall panel that either had the Aliens 'language' or readings on it or hinted at the inner workings of a ship. I decided on a slightly distorted map of the world, to illustrate co-ordinates or directions that the Alien would be following.

wheel

This video on Matter Painting I've watched illustrates how having a little added movement in a still image can really sell it's believability and add a little more depth to the environment. It's highlighted to me how using a lot of reference, stock images and manipulation can help give a more realistic result. If I were to change my environment design I would have tried to add a lot more detail to give a sense of this realism as to me it looks a little empty, however because I am using quite heavy shadows I can get away with it slightly.