Behind The Scenes: Mars Colony

I've always been a huge sci-fi fan and aside from action science fiction, I always loved space operas like 2001: Space Odyssey, or recently Interstellar or Martian. And of course, I saw some of the space habitat dioramas out there already, so I wanted to take this for a spin.  

I didn't want to go realistic, since that would require a lot of research to get things right and I'm influenced with games too, so you can see some Mass Effect or space 4X games inspiration here. For some reason, I defaulted for a Mars environment, because I really like and follow the SpaceX effort to build the Martian colony.

So as you can see, multiple sources of inspiration come into play here and whatever I do, it's always something I really like and I'm into for years or at least very intensively for a shorter period of time.

I started collecting some images of martian colony renders to get a mood in place and to see, what kinds of designs are out there. So starting with structures from a more realistic spectrum, I would include some Mars terrain too to get a good feeling of how it should look.

Then I searched for more science fiction designs, like you can see in Mass Effect and games like that. I included one indoor scene just for the purpose of reminding me, that it would look great to have some greenhouse there for some added interest and nice color contrast too.

I planned to do a vehicle parked outside, so I've studied how some of the more realistic rovers look and then included more sci-fi designs. As you can see, the vehicle didn't happen on the final render due to time limitations.

Time for pencil! I've tried to come up with some interesting building layout with a greenhouse, so I've  included two blocks stacked on top of each other to suggest modularity and I wanted to have a nice transparent greenhouse module connected with a cylindrical tunnel of some sorts. I don't know what the material it is exactly, but I like the kind of a cloth-like isolation material, that you can see on a moon base in the reference.

For the vehicle, I went for a simple geometry and I wanted to include LED strips along the front columns, but it never made it into modeling stage. I felt like the scene would be just too messy and I was in a hurry to remake it.

I sketched some of the details, like window shapes, panels and some terrain features. I suggested placements for some decals too, because what would be a sci-fi design without some decals, right? :)

In the modeling stage, I used a lot of shortcuts (not the keyboard ones) to be able to make something look cool with least amount of effort. So the greenhouse is just filled with leaf particles, terrain is displaced with a texture and I even tried the new cloth sculpting brush. It's awesome!

Have a look :)

So that was the martian colony scene for this week. Thanks for reading and I hope it will help you with your next work.