Solace

http://lucasgreen.ca/portfolio_page/solace/

Norwegian director Rune Davidsen needed a very unusual starship created for his short film, Solace, about the first humans to travel to the sun.

I was approached to complete six shots of the Solace, including a 1400-frame opening shot which featured the fully-rigged starship spreading it’s sails in the sunlight.

The model was built and rigged very quickly in Maya to meet the production schedule, but with detail emphasized around key areas to be featured in closeups. The sails featured animated cloudlike textures and were rendered with subsurface scattering to suggest the balloon-like sails were filled with rolling plasma.

The sun was created as a massive 4k square 2d asset, built from a combination of over 200 discrete elements, including animated astrophotography of the sun, practically-shot pyro footage, and maya fluid simulations.