Back to the Heavy Rig

 I returned to the recent space vehicle project—the Heavy Rig from Orbital Elements. Last week, I spent hours trying to rig the container folding system so I could animate all the containers folding in and out. It didn't go well, so I took a break. I'll need to start with something simpler and do more practice rigging before having another go.

In the meantime, I decided to bring the updated folding system into the animation scene and incorporate the missing sub-vehicles, two drone landers that can detach and deliver containers to surface installations.

The idea with the lander was to riff on the Eagle from Space 1999. 

A sketched idea

Ultimately, I wanted something closer to the Eagle, but not slavishly so, particularly with the main truss element.

That's pretty much what I was looking for...

Serious high-poly oopsy

So the cloth bagging, surely an essential element in NASA-like space vehicle modelling, looked great. It looked better than the earlier cloth elements I'd created with Fluent's cloth maker. When I saved the scene, I was shocked that it was nearly 1GB, which is about ten times larger than expected. It turned out those bag elements were absolutely huge polygon hogs. I optimised them so they're about 10% of the original polycount but with a slight loss in baggy quality.

A first pass at the materials. Nothing too snazzy as these vehicles will be attached to the rig, so not all that visible.

In place, on the rig:

A tad over-exposed, but it sells the configuration.

And animate!!

There's a small flaw. Some mesh blocks are spinning with the camera for some reason. It's enough to discourage me from sharing, but I'll render the sequence again tonight with those so-and-sos removed. I might try to add a planet into the background.