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Behind the Scenes: Millenium Falcon Illustration
🕑 Added 2024-03-02 18:36:35 +0000 UTC
This week, I wanted to do something Star Wars. I browsed through some of my older works and realized I've never done the legendary Millenium Falcon interior. When flicking through some images, it was pretty obvious that no.1 choice would be the iconic holochess game table and the surrounding lounge area.
I went and gather as much reference as possible to look at the area from multiple angles. It's not enough to only check out the direct movie reference, but other sources as well if you're going for stylized work. I can give you ideas and suggestions on what to consider important and what can be simplified.
Visit the full Pinboard here
Do you really need all the panels and pipes? All the buttons. Would the scene be readable, or become messy at that scale? And speaking of scale, how large the objects should be in relation to each other? How far apart?
When you're doing realistic work, you just need to keep the measurements. When illustrating, you need to answer all of these questions. You can ponder them and come up with solutions, but you won't know they work until you see them.
That's why the next step - the sketch is so essential for me. It enables me to ask all of this ahead of time and trying different answers costs only a bit of erasing and few more lines. Much less than a 3D re-work.
When I'm satisfied with the sketch, I go into Blender and block out the proportions. Mostly using simple objects and primitives. There is always some hidden caveat when you're transferring from sketch to 3D. The precise nature of 3D will often surprise you, so you have a round 2 of composition and layout puzzles to solve. But these are most of the time minor tweaks easily figured out with boxes and primitives.
One of the challenges here was tunnel that goes into the room. If I want to keep the illustration clean with hexagonal outline, I needed to somehow hide the tunnel geometry on the outside.
Luckily Blender has some amazing tools, including the compositor, which allows you create multiple sets of objects and render them out into render layers. After that, you can use multiple systems in node-based compositor editor to mix and match. Here, I only needed to render out two sets of the scene, with and without the tunnel, and use third render layer with transparent outline of the room to use as a mask between those two.
You can watch the process video on Youtube.
