A realistic looking Space environment might be a difficult task to produce in Maya. I’m unsure how many lights I can include to give the illusion of stars or if there are other way of getting around this. I have come across this article which has a good tutorial on how to create a 3D galaxy/space scene within Maya. I will give this a try and if I fail I will try a different approach.
I have followed some tips from this article (link here).
After having read through this tutorial I realised that creating a galactic environment full of stars is actually quite simple using Maya 3D brushes. Below are some of my first experiments with these brushes. I think they turned out ok, maybe not as organic as I would like, but the colours are pretty. Once we get the overall feeling of our light sources and colour for the animation as a whole, I feel we can then decide upon a definite colour scheme for the stars. I feel the red stars are pretty cool and could be used to help with the overall fizzy juice symbolism that is present in the animation.
Below are some photographs I have taken of quick space watercolours I had done before trying it in Maya to see if I could make load a painting in, but this definitely wasn’t going to give the finished look we needed.
From here I then decided to try a digital painting but this was still to no avail. When I loaded this image into Maya and set it up for Image Based Lighting it looked quite pixilated.
References
Highend3d.com. (2017). Creating a galaxy in Maya using Paint Effects – Page 1 – Paint FX Tutorials for Maya. [online] Available at: https://www.highend3d.com/maya/tutorials/paint-fx/c/creating-a-galaxy-in-maya-using-paint-effects [Accessed 1 Apr. 2017].
