Behind The Scenes: Mars Rover

Sometime last week, I saw a comment suggestion to make Perseverance mission diorama and sometimes it's all it takes to get inspired to create something. I've looked up some materials about the mission and started to think about what should it look like, what style would it fit the best and how I want to actually approach the model.

At the same time, I started to weight the animation options. It's a long time since I've done some loop animation and maybe it's time. Right after I started to think about the animation, I've immediately imagined this cute rover rolling along on the Martian surface and scanning the surroundings.

When you start thinking about animation, your story options expand and I found it funny to include some classic green martian aliens popping up from the ground and then trying to hide from the rover. Of course, I wasn't able to do the animation in time, so I put a pin in that and focused on one still frame instead.

Visit the full Pinboard here

There was a lot of imagery and documentation around the mission, so the references wasn't that hard to come by. The challenge was on deciding how to approach the rover modeling and how it should look like. You can imagine how modeling a full scale model with all the details could easily take weeks. 

At the same time, realistic rover model wouldn't support the Martian joke that much, so I was looking for a way how to stylize the thing. That's why I included some low poly or stylized sci-fi vehicles and some hard surface model references, to have a style guide and direction I wanted to go.

When creating stylized art, it's always about being able to simplify and abstract the key features and shapes that make up the overall look and character. It really helps to zoom out quite a bit and distill the main features. In this case, it was the rectangular body of the rover, it's six wheels and mounted camera and sensors, that resembled the head the most.

I've decided I will leave out the long arm, as it would make the model more complicated and harder to read. I sketched out the body using basic geometry to try the proportions that work and made the "head" slightly larger so it looks like a cute little robot.

I kept the terrain features simple (not much of a choice on Mars anyway) and decided on the placement of the rover and Martian. Equipped with reference board and sketch, I've decided to create a low definition hard surface model with rough surfaces and more flat lighting to support the cartoon idea and got to work :)

You can watch the time lapse process on YouTube