Behind the Scenes: Off-World Colony

There are many methods and exercises, that can help you to find your next project. In this case, I chose to be a bit methodical and instead of going through my old notes, I created a new list. List of interesting themes and genres. You know, like wild west, high fantasy, historical periods, space...

Then I gave it another go, and expanded and cross-combined all the candidates until I felt I exhausted all the options. You can also use AI to help you generate interesting themes and genres list.?

Then I just go through the results and narrow down the candidates. I just think about few ideas for each of the themes and see if some of those excite me. Then rinse and repeat.

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This way, I landed on a space theme. Nothing special I know, but to really find that spark to start a project, I had to first see all of the others, that I just didn't feel like creating. Simple as that. While going through the potential genres and thinking about variations, the idea of a planetary low sci-fi base came to my mind.

A classic space design, that you could expect in a base-building strategy game. Thinking about this, I remembered one of my older space-ship designs. Really simple one, vaguely inspired by old cassette futurism aesthetics of the 80's space cartoons like SIlverhawks. I saved it for later and went on to get some other references.

I researched some space base designs and layouts, focusing on types and shapes of buildings and how they're used and interconnected.

I sketched out a very rough layout, placing different types of modules, like living quarters, common room, greenhouse and landing platform. I went through my list of references few times over, always looking for new details to include in the sketch.?

I added a structure buried in the ground, serving as a mine and refinery to help with the ship refueling and also some solar panels to power the station. The goal was not to build something realistic, but at least somewhat thought through and believable.?

Now back to the older spacecraft design I saved. You might think I lost the track of my references, because the spaceship in my final design is nothing like that. It's basically a standard rocket ship design.?

But I definitely took advantage of that older inspiration. For a style transfer.? I wanted to do a low poly design, but when you do a sci-fi genre, sharp edges just don't cut it. Sci-fi always calls for a little bit more definition and that hard surface feeling. And I manged to do just that with that old ship design.

The key are light reflections. If you're able to better define edges, you can get much better sci-fi results. Enter one-segment bevel. It's not so much, that it would break the flat shaded low-poly style, but it gives the geometry that one extra step to catch some light and help you deliver those refined edges.

You can watch the full?process video on Youtube?

See you in the next one!