This early mood shot was probably the most guiding during the process. It set the mood for these large, ambiguous pieces of geometry that felt like they placed some part in the purpose of manufacturing - in this case, heat presses
One of my favourite, but unused designs from this period.
This was pretty early and slightly ugly, but it subconciously lead to the slanted design of the Sotiyo later.
Clusters of detail, like ship hangars and docking bays, clustered between gaps of large geometry.
Simple planes creating some interesting areas for light to play.
An under-shot of a really early take on what an XL engineering complex might have looked like. Using slanted surfaces and tons of negative space early on showed how powerful playing with light and dark areas would be on these stations.
Shots like these inspired us to leave lots of gaps in the geometry of the final models, allowing negative spaces to do a lot of work for us in conveying scale.
Lots of shapes were designed to be slightly ambiguous, but convey some idea of industrial purpose. These towers were a kind of cross between some kind of mega structure and a crane.
This was the really early, and most vital work i did on the Engineering Complexes for Eve.
I knew from the start that we'd be limited with polygons and tiling textures, so we'd have to rely on a mix of large, basic shapes and use geometry to break up texture repetition. I was also stumped for quite a while how to create something that looked like a factory in space - there was no real life equivalent to anything on this scale. Early viz dev mostly consisted of messing around with a kitbash kit Pavel Savchuk had created for the Citadel structures, and finding elements and shapes i liked that could be incorporated later, rather than trying to go for any initial actual design shapes, which is the opposite of how i usually approach things.
This was a lot like photography really, i was generating tons of weird looking things and then just exploring them for cool shots to recreate later when i had a better understanding of the design i wanted.
