Alien Transmission

A new model of a satellite dish built for Patrons

Hi everyone! Thanks for being our Patrons! We have more stuff in the queue, but I took a bit building this, and now I'm finally sharing it!

This one has been a ride. As I mentioned last time, Polycam released a new feature where you can upload a single image and it will make a 3D model from that image. It's pretty decent, but what is excellent is that it gives you a rough shape to build from. So I had Midjourney generate an image.

I thought that was pretty cool. So I had Polycam do its thing. It was ok, although not as good as I had hoped in this case—I've had better attempts—but it was still great to use as a guide. And that's extra helpful when I'm sitting around at night listening to a podcast. If I have to think too much about what I'm doing, I miss what's going on in the podcast, but this helps alleviate that just enough so that I don't lose my place.

Eventually I built out a whole model and nothing from the original image was left. I rigged the model. At first I tried to use constraints in Blender, but I ran into some issues. So then I tried bones—and ran into different issues! I eventually fixed both, and those are both included in this download. When I was done, I had Midjourney make a background image for the scene that would allow this dish to feel absolutely massive. Then I started to texture. I decided to texture this using the original image Midjourney came up with, in sort of an Ian Hubert fashion. Then it was just down to compositing. I added a truck in the desert for scale, and that was that.

This isn't built to be seen up close, so if you want to get super close, you might need to re-texture/model some things. But I'd say it looks pretty good from its intended viewing distance.

See you soon!