lordaardvarksfm

That Which Does Not Belong [Hiveship Update]

Added 2016-09-28 00:34:40 +0000 UTC

So I posted this on my Tumblr, but I am reposting it here for those who don't follow my Tumblr regularly.

I accidentally an exterior for the titular vessel of The Hiveship. And it was originally 1,000,000 polygons.

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Came across this free-to-use open-license sculpture totally on accident, while idly brainstorming Hiveship with Ivan (voice actor for the aliens in Blue Star). He brought up some external shots of the Hiveship, and I was noting I didn’t know of any good ships to source. While looking through Google Images of what I was looking for, I just so happened across this download.

I ended up paring it down to just over 200,000 polygons, so I could actually UV unwrap it and texture it.

This mesh is almost exactly what I was looking for in a Hiveship mesh: it’s goopy, it’s fleshy, and it’s chaotic. It’s also covered in tentacles, which I think is a great mechanism for foreshadowing the events of Hiveship.

Combined with some equally chaotic textures, a baked normal-map, some detail textures and normals (still work in progress), and some slimy material parameters, and I think this mesh has gotten ostensibly close to the Eldritch, almost Lovecraftian, design that I wanted.

The origins of the Hiveship in the film of the same name are still a bit fluid, but right now I am pretty convinced its final story will be that it simply doesn’t belong (hence the poster title). It is alien even to the aliens of the Metroid universe. A traveler from another reality.

I thought I’d share this, just a show that I am still actively thinking about, and idly working on, Hiveship. It’s still a ways out yet (I want to cautiously say a year; I have 3 more episodes of Blue Star to do after this episode, with 3 side-projects in between them. Assuming a month per project, that’s 6 months before I can go full gear into Hiveship, and then I want to say it’ll take 3- to 4- months to build Hiveship... I’m going all-out on it and making it a full-feature film, probably in the 10-to-20-minute range).