A common problem with modularity and having a lot of symmetry is that the scene can become very same-looking all around. Every time I see something written about this problem, there’s usually the same emphasis: Lighting. And I agree. You can almost make the same room twice and people won’t notice if you change up the lighting enough (nicely discussed in this presentation on Skyrim by Joel Burgess). I think because this scene is just one large room, it’s quite acceptable for there to be a lot of repetition – if it were a whole complex that used the same assets all over, it would begin to be a problem, people would get lost in it and such. Keep in mind lots of real-world installations and environments have lots of the same thing in them, too. So when it came to making the individual details on each asset, something I noticed was I could make them look like they had a real-world standardisation to them. Pieces that look like they could be easily replaced helped sell the repetition as being more ‘genuine’, at least to me. Though the bigger stuff in the scene didn’t need to look entirely functional, I figured it was far more vital that they just looked like they could support their own weight. And in the end, a light dusting of props on top of it all breaks up the otherwise uniform silhouette.

The hardest part to design was definitely the airlock, the centrepiece. Once I had the design down, the modelling process wasn’t uniquely challenging in any big way, but I stumbled through several different designs before resorting to taking it directly out of The Martian. I fully admit to that.In times of great need, reference is your friend!

Materials Breakdown

Quixel was used to make and export pretty much all the materials you see. The way you start is by creating an ‘ID map’ from flat colours, to specify which parts of the model have different materials. My Maya script of choice for doing this is Nightshade Blockout. I then import the mesh and its maps into Quixel DDO and use their fantastic material library to apply materials to the various parts of the ID map on the model (sometimes after using NDO to paint normal map details and bake AO). You can adjust how much each material affects the bump and roughness, and add in things like scratches, dirt and rust on top. DDO does pretty much all the grind work for you, allowing you to experiment a lot more and spend more time telling the ‘story’ of each model – how it was made, what it’s for, and what’s happened to it over the course of its use. The idea of setting the scene on Mars came from me adding a light sand layer to the floor pieces and wondering what it would look like if I made it red!