Armillary

One of our early games for inspiration came from anti-chamber, In this room they have a collection of weird and warpy models.

Image of their own take on a armillary machine

My concept for a hub world in which the armillary would surround.

The Hub world was scrapped as weren't going to get time for it.

Started modelling pieces, my original idea was to have each ring represent Gravity, Space and Time. I also wanted to have them geometrically simple. One would be circles, one would be triangular and one would be square. The primitive building blocks of design to reference to building blocks of our reality. 

This parts where created individual and then model into a curve to fit around a cyclinder. The object pivot was placed in the middle and I would rotate and copy. This was really difficult, the rotation could each be different and the snaps rotations often different correlate to the curve I needed. 

It was difficult to warp the object into a correct shape on the outer side, I used FDD modifiers but also extend the inside circle out wards and using snaps to place the verts.

Wanted to make the triangle piece made completely out of triangles, instead of its shape being square.

These above are the same angle to the camera I was trying to get the right warping to make it circular

Bulked up the corners to avoid clipping.

So many renditions, I had to rebuild the pink ones a few times as 3Ds max's extrude tool created extra plains and vertices. Also the warped ones are for blend shape experimentation.

Got a Bend script called Bend of Brothers, really helped at getting spherical shape without me trying to guess bend parameters.

Experimenting with Blends, Whether to apply them too individual pieces or to the whole ring, I tried to do both and use the overal blends to rotate the rings 360. This wasn't very effective.

Blend shapes, Morph Targets

The Array tool, after learning a plugin I learnt two more ways to place objects in a spherical shape. Array tool and Spacing tool. They have really weird methodology to replacing the blocks seen above, Using the graph editor and copying data

Created some interesting shapes with out Binding

My square I made for this.

I then went on too the circular piece modelling using the loft tool

Can see some issues in the render getting the twist to perfectly match up

Also the inside had huge amounts of un-need polys.

Tested Baking the high poly

lost a lot of detail on the low poly, so tried removing inside polys and unwrapping, wasn't very effective though. 

Trying to cut the inside was a pain in the butt, and not really required. I also after this took it into Zbrush to see what its retopo tools could achieve, some where ok just not good enough.

Making the square piece

Think this displays my experience back then, wasn't sure to bake one piece on to another and then duplicate to make a sphere after. Or make to copies of a sphere and bake them on to each other. As they identical its defiantly better to make one smaller version then duplicated. Its also easier to unwrap although can create seems.

My high and low poly triangle

Finally armillary but not really, It produced nice renders, but was hard to texture and super high poly.