First entry.

This blog is for documenting my progress of re-creating the alien attack ship from Roland Emmerich's 1996 movie Independence Day.

The film is a bit disputed between critics, with an average score of 6.6/10 of IMDB, but since it is a disaster movie you have to see it with the right eyes. What Jeremy Clarkson said about the Hummer H2 once on Top Gear pretty much sums up this film, he said something like "It is like a roman orgy, a Viennese waltz and a missile attack on Las Vegas".

So, anyway:

The whole craft has a very organic feel to it, with lots of curves and vein-like lines, grooves and bone-like support struts. The designers and modelers were probably inspired by Geiger, but the design is very unique, it looks far more crude around the edges, more insectoid and the texture is rough and metallic.

It is a challenging task for a beginner like me to create a photo-realistic model of a complex thing like this, but the aesthetics of this spacecraft really appeals to me. It is the blend of organic form, metals, pipes, bones, fang-like insectoid front parts, the alien skull shaped "head" and overall crude, scary and definitely other-worldly look. It is the sum of all these elements that makes it look frightening and awesome. This is not the shiney, glowy, clean and happy type of alien spacecraft from E.T or Close Encounters, but more like a mutated alien version of the Millennium Falcon, crude, old and dusty, but still looks very brutal.

On the visual effects course I were warned not to use spaceships in my vfx shots, but this craft is an iconic piece of 90's cinema, and disaster movies in general. I might not end up using it in a shot, but I will at least render a few stills of it to put in my reel.

I have just started to work on the engines, but since it is impossible to get hold of any precise references, I have had to fill in the gaps with my own imagination. There is one shot of the rear of the craft in the movie, it is the scene right after the hillbilly sacrifices himself, where a few fighters return to dock in the main motherhip.

A lot of the details on the model will look a lot better with texture, since the surface on the whole craft looks like it is covered in small nubs, like crude sand paper. This will be added with normal and displacement mapping in Mudbox. The ribs were hard to line up properly, and there is some empty space in the slot in the main hull, but I will put some bits and bobs in there to fill it up.

This is the reference set-up in 3DS Max, with front, left and top views. The top reference is supposedly from a sketch of the original plastic cast model, and is not a photoshopped reference from the movie.