Right from the very start of production there was always a plan for the aliens in the film to have a hero ship that would feature prominently throughout the movie. The Moth ship, as it became known, was one of the first space ships on the drawing board and throughout production and post has morphed through many designs. It has also found itself living in a total of four different 3D modeling programs that began with Lightwave, before moving into Maya and 3DStudio Max with some extensive texturing done in Modo. It is the latter two programs that were used for the version that will be seen in the finished film.

Over the course of production, which ran for quite some years, we found ourselves unable to tackle the task of actually producing many finished visual effects shots as the edit was in a constant state of flux. Despite the lack of a locked edit which would allow us to produce shots that would end up in the final film, we were however able to work on CG assets like the Moth ship. This involved creating concept art and rough sketches showing the shape and form of the ship along with defining fine details that would help to sell the reality and scale of the CG models. These artworks would then be used as reference for the 3D model.  

The Moth Ship was originally modeled in Lightwave and some very early tests of it can be seen in a few shots that were done in the early stages of production.

As the seasons came and went and the film continued through production, so too the landscape of 3D software changed and we found ourselves doing some of the film’s VFX using Maya. A decision was made to remodel the Moth Ship, taking the opportunity to revamp some of the detailing and rig it for animation that would allow us to take full advantage of the design which had these big ‘fins’ at the back which were some kind of steering mechanism, a cross between a bird’s tail and a boat’s fin.

More tests were done using the new model and a few shots that were extremely good candidates for becoming final shots, even though at this stage the edit still wasn’t locked, were tackled.  One of these shots featured a flyby right past camera as the Moth Ship bears down on Skylab, and up until only a couple of years ago was still in the movie although it has since been replaced with the final version of the ship.

This version of the Moth Ship stayed with the movie for quite a few years, and although it was used in quite a few shots that were all CG and didn’t require any live action or a locked edit, it was still waiting for it’s time in the movie’s VFX spotlight. As was the case though with a lot of elements from the film, after a few years it began to show it’s age, a combination of computing power, new modeling and texturing techniques and my ability when it came to modeling and texturing meant that it basically wasn’t good enough anymore.  

The decision was made to proceed with version 3, which just happened to coincide with a major shift in the film’s story regarding the Moth Ship.  Although there has only ever been one hero ship in the film, there was another alien ship featured and it was the design idea of turning the Moth Ship into a kind of ‘Tug boat’ or ‘Truck Cab’ that prompted the melding of the two designs. The two different ships would effectively be the same ‘Tug’ ship, that would attach itself to two different other ships and act as their propulsion system. There would be a transport attachment which is known in the film as ‘The Bucket’ and a Scout attachment which due to it’s saucer shape is known as ‘A Hoax’ (who says SABER don’t have a sense of humour).

Sometimes it feels like we should be members of the United Nations when it comes to the amount of 3D programs that have been used on the film and for version three of the Moth Ship it was the turn of 3DStudio Max and Modo. Modeling can be quite a quick process but I find that texturing can take almost twice as long sometimes, especially if you’re trying to achieve a large amount of uniqueness across the texture maps. To help speed this up I brought Modo into the loop to use it’s texture painting tools which to be honest are largely responsible for the quality of the texturing work for the third (and final version) of the Moth Ship. Although Modo was used for texturing, the modeling was done in Max, this was purely for speed as I knew Max’s modeling tools better (I know, Modo is world class at modeling - but speed was also a major factor). The process of using both applications was pretty much pain free, some parts of the model were UV unwrapped in Max, in which case the model stayed there and only the textures were painted in Modo, while other times the mesh was unwrapped in Modo and then passed back to Max. Although Photoshop is marvelous in many ways, you just can’t beat the intuitive nature of painting directly onto an object as if it were a plastic miniature.*

* If you haven’t seen the demo of Weta and the Foundry’s new texture painting tool Mari, you should check it out here and here.