Warning: Contains nudity and images of violence

The Villikon Chronicles presented an opportunity for me to do things a little differently. The space ships were modelled almost entirely with zbrush retopology tools and then finished off in Lightwave. While the smaller ship, the Amphiox, wasn’t sculpted after that the larger ship, the Providence was. I’d wanted to get away from the generic sci fi weathered panel lines and go down a different route. Slightly more sinister and organic. There were limits though as I had to do this in work on 1Gb computer so my poly counts were severely restricted. But from where its seen in the film and with the dirty looking textures, cold blue lights and triangular forms it works quite well.

Wire frames of the Providence and the Amphiox

The Providence.

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The crucifixion field presented a whole load of challenges, but sculpting wasn’t one of them. This was good fun to sculpt despite the morbid subject matter. All the sculpts started from the same UV’d low base mesh. No re-topology was done as they weren’t to be animated and where never seen really close up. In fact if you were actually to see their faces you’d be horrified but there was no need for anything other than rough form.

For the close up shots I exported high res meshes from Zbrush and used normals for more detail. I find displacement and subdivision surfaces problematic in Lightwave with regards to render times. With a regular poly mesh rendering times were consistent and predictable.

For the wide shot I just used low res meshes with normal maps.

These are the high res versions used for the closeups.