Hello everyone. I feel like this project is at a point where I am happy enough with my work that I can show it off. A bit of background first, however. I found the MakeHuman software late last June while poking around the internet. Upon finding this software, I decided to make a 3D model of my Starbound player avatar. My reason for doing so is that I was never overly satisfied with the digital drawings I had previously made of her, so I saw an opportunity to make something I would be much happier showing off when I found MakeHuman.
I will spare the reader with the details of how this project morphed into what it is now, but assuming I don't burn out, the current end goal for the project is to make a short stop-motion style video of the events of the game Starbound as the Ashley Aerostar character experienced them. I have embellished and/or altered some details of the base game's plot, and have even given the character a full personality and background and added to her story after the events of the game's end. While the end goal is a short video, during this time where I am still in the process of making assets for this project, my focus is just to make a render every so often as I make new assets.
There are now a total of six custom characters, each with their own mostly fleshed out personalities and backstories. Four were the result of creative decisions I have made over the course of this project's life.
The custom characters are as follows:
Ashley Jade Aerostar: The main player character. Since she is the main player character, her personality is heavily based on my own personality, but has enough differences to make her distinct from myself.
Corran Lewis Aerostar: Someone who Ashley rescued early in the game's events who she eventually marries after the end of the main story.
Daniel Christopher Aerostar: The original player character. I made this player character first, but never finished the game with him for some reason, so he has now been re-purposed into Ashley's brother character.
Nova Lux Aerostar: First daughter of Ashley and Corran. Born after events of game have finished.
Kimberly Spero Aerostar: Second daughter of Ashley and Corran. Born about three years after Nova.
Nokia Aerostar: Brain child of Nova and Kimberly. A sapient android prototype made a member of the Aerostar family.
Most of the clothing that the characters wear was made by members of this community, and those that use CC-BY licenses and that appear in renders posted here will be credited at the end of this post. Many of the clothing articles have had their textures edited by myself to better suit my needs/desires for the appearance of the clothing article in question.
All of my rendering has been done in Blender using the Cycles render engine. The terrain meshes were made in Blender using the Landscape plugin, and the trees are free to use assets I found online. Almost all of the scenery props and all the buildings have been made in AutoCAD by myself, as I am more comfortable modeling non-sculpted objects with AutoCAD than I am with Blender. These objects are then exported from AutoCAD to Fusion 360, and then exported from there to OBJ files, which then have their materials applied to the models once the OBJ files have been imported into Blender.
My biggest hurdle to overcome throughout this entire project has been getting the character models to emote properly. I have mild Asperger's, which makes it very difficult for me to read other people's body language and facial cues. This means that for every character except Ashley, the more emotive I want the character to be in a given scene, the harder it is to capture and recreate the subtle body language and facial cues associated with that emotive state.
Here are a few of the renders I have made so far:
This scene shows off the arch model I made for scenes pertaining to Ashley and Corran's wedding and was also made to show off the dress I had chosen for Ashley to wear for scenes pertaining to her wedding. This is my most recent render of Ashley by herself. The arch took about six hours to make from start of modeling to the point it was ready to used in a scene, two hours of which were spent on setting up the gold trim along the edges.
This scene is set to take place shortly before the final quest of the base game in Starbound. Ashley is walking along the shore of a lake on the planet she started the game on, Ilusoria Sigma IV, the same planet as the one she is on the above render. It is impossible to tell in this render, but she is supposed to be singing while walking.
This was a scene I made for New Years Day this year, and features all of the characters I currently have models for. It is set to take place on New Year's Day in-universe about 23 years after the conclusion of the events of the main questline in Starbound.
This scene was originally going to used for a Christmas render, but I ran into problems with it that made it so that I couldn't render it in time for Christmas, so I repurposed the scene into what it is now. The scene had to be split into three parts to get it to render on my computer, which were then recombined into one image via GIMP.
Listing of the characters from left to right, we have: Nokia, Nova, Kimberly, Corran, and Ashley.
This render is not without its flaws, most notably that the material for Ashley's skin got messed up somewhere along the course of the development of the scene, a mistake I didn't notice until after I had finished the combined image.
This scene was made after I had finally gotten the walls, floor, and ceiling for the main residential floor of the Aerostar house modeled and gotten the materials all set up. This is the main hall of the main residential floor, and the tables visible here were the only furniture I had finished modeling at the time this scene was made. It is set an hour or so before the previous render, with Nova and Kimberly leaving the house to make final checks on the fireworks show they had put together. Nokia can be seen waiting for them around the corner, head turned in their direction to signify that she has heard the approaching sisters.
As the reader might be able to tell, this isn't a render. This is a screenshot of the floor plans for the bottom three floors of the Aerostar house as they look in AutoCAD. The house is a four story house, with three of those floors below ground for in-universe security reasons, and so that I can get away with only ever having one floor loaded into any given Blender file. The ground floor, the one not in this screenshot, is mainly just a large workshop area for Ashley and later Nova that is filled with CNC machines and any other machinery needed to make whatever creations the two can come up with. The second floor is the main residential floor, with the third floor being the secondary residential floor. The fourth floor is the utility floor, with a weapon storage room kept under lock and key, access to the house's fusion power generator, the water heating and purification room, the air conditioning and filtration room, the main computer and its server racks, and a hoverbike garage that connects to the surface via a tunnel.
These renders feature Nokia and Kimberly. These renders take place about six months after the New Year’s render. In the first render, Nokia has picked up a picture frame that has the New Year’s render, pleasant memories coming to mind. As Nokia looks at the photo, she thinks about how it feels like she has become a member of the family in the eight months she has been fully operational, causing her eye color to start flickering between its neutral color, happy color, and a color that wasn’t programmed into her, indicating a new set of emotions. Her eye color eventually settles on the new color, a deeper blue than the light blue that indicates Nokia is in a happy mood. This image is actually a composite of three different renders, edited and combined with GIMP.
In the second render, Kimberly has come across Nokia and asked her what she is doing before noticing that Nokia’s eye color is one that Kimberly didn’t program into Nokia’s “OS”. Kimberly askes Nokia what she is feeling at the moment, Nokia response being, “Seeing this photo made me realize that it feels like I have become a member of this family. I feel wanted, like I belong.” With Nokia’s words and body language, Kimberly realizes what Nokia’s new eye color signifies, that being that Nokia is feeling loved.
This is a render of the master bathroom countertop and sinks in the Aerostar house. The main material for the countertop is a procedural marble material I made myself by following a tutorial. As you can see, the house isn't completely modeled yet.
This is a render of Nova as a 13 year old. This render was made to fill a picture frame within the house, though I still put effort into trying to make it look decent.
This is a render of Kimberly as a ten year old. Like the previous render, this render was made to fill a picture frame in the Aerostar house. Unlike the previous render, however, this scene with Kimberly was a pain in the rear end to get to a state that I was satisfied with. All of the issues I had making this render arose as a result of the expression I chose for Kimberly. I tried to go for a "I've suddenly been asked to smile for a camera with no warning I'd be doing so today, but am happy to oblige my mother anyway" kind of face. I spent many hours tweaking and adjusting her mouth in an effort to make it not look uncanny.
EDIT: I have replaced the image that was here with an updated version of the same image. The updated image uses the current version of Ashley's model and the image has gone through a fog glow filter to make the blade glow.
In this render, Ashley is wearing the Midnight Exigent armor from Destiny 2. In her hands is my model of the Protectorate Broadsword, an end game weapon in Starbound. I always envisioned the Protectorate Broadsword was a plasma sword like the lightsaber or plasma sword from the Halo games. This image was a suggestion from my brothers, and is actually a combination of two renders, one where Ashley had the armor on and one where the armor was off, using the blade of the Protectorate Broadsword to bisect the image into it's two halves. The texture for her bodysuit is a modified version of the base texture of the Skintight Body Suit clothing model, and has been modified to look more like the clothing the player character starts the game with.
In this render, Ashley is wearing the Titan-class Reverie Dawn armor from Destiny 2.
Here are the three Aerostar ladies at the gun range with their long range weapons of choice. All of the weapons are guns from the game Destiny 2.
Ashley, in the back, is using the Dreaded Venture kinetic sniper rifle, and is currently making sure that her daughters are doing okay in the ammo department. Kimberly, in the middle, is using the Go Figure kinetic quad-burst pulse rifle. Nova, in the foreground, is using the IKELOS SR V1.0.1 energy sniper rifle, and is just about done slotting a new ammo power pack into the gun.
This scene was made primarily to show off the improvements I have recently made to make the gun models look higher poly than they really are. Their protective headphones are punkduck’s headset model, though I have edited them so as to remove the microphone from the headset.
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List of community assets used:
AVA Ex Machina Bodysuit: punkduck
black cocktail dress: punkduck
Chunky Chain~Heart Necklace: Elvaerwyn
Costume Leggings: punkduck
Denim Jacket: punkduck
evening gloves: punkduck
Evening gown: punkduck
F Dress 01: Mindfront
F Dress 02: Mindfront
F Dress 03: Mindfront
F Dress 09: Mindfront
F Dress 11: Mindfront
F Lusekofta: Mindfront
french lingerie (bra): punkduck
french lingerie (stockings): punkduck
french lingerie (thong): punkduck
M Suit 01: Mindfront
Male Classic Jeans (and associated belt): punkduck
Motorcycle Jacket: punkduck
Mototcycle Pants: punkduck
Running Shoes 01: punkduck
Shoes Biker Boots female: Mindfront
Shoes Biker Boots male: Mindfront
Skintight Body Suit (Female): TioMegamanX
Wireless Headset: punkduck
Let me know if I missed any attributions.
I will add more every so often as I make renders, but updates on this will likely be months apart, since I am the only person working on this right now. I have opted to currently only post the best renders I have made so far, but I do have more renders from the project that I can post if people want to see renders with a little bit less polish. If anyone has any questions about this project, I am willing to answer them, and constructive criticism is also welcome.