Submission thread

[citizen]

The Control Chair used by the Setepod Cumulate, a nation that shares, not so great diplomatic relations with Earth. The Setepods are a Cephalopoda like Alien, that share characteristics with Earth Octopi, but also Starfish, and even snails. They have two highly developed antenna that can sense changes in temperature, texture and chemical composition (like taste). The Antenna can also generate changes in texture and taste by filling small chemical sacs with different compositions of chemicals, which allows the Setapod to use these as their primary form of communication. The chair's controls mimic this ability with arrays of slightly porous chemical sacs and chemical sniffers on the control surfaces.

Wip Thread



I learned a few things doing this chair. I'd never rigged a creature like the Setepod before, in fact I've never rigged anything without using Character Studio before, so that was quite challenging. It took me a few attempts to get something usable, but in the end using bones bound to a spline through spline IK for each tentacle and Antenna I managed to get quite a good rig. Completely useless if you wanted to do animation, but good enough for a still...

I also used layers for the first time to get a bit more logical organisation in to my scene, I knew layers existed in Max, but had never really paid attention to them. I think I'll use them more often from now on, as separating the inside and outside areas of a spacecraft in to layers, for example, would be enormously helpful.

I think I learnt a few things about the metal shader too, which I haven't really used before.

[Sphynx]

Thread closed!