Intro

I will always remember making this image as it was a lot of fun! I did this image for a contest for The Gnomon Workshop and I had less than 20 days to complete it. The theme of the contest was "Incubator” and my first step was to come up with a nice concept.

Concept

I wanted to do an old laboratory style incubator. I imagined it to have a new kind of genetically engineered plant, which produced super oxygen to feed a new species. I wanted to integrate a character as well so I came up with this concept drawing in Photoshop (Fig.01).

Modeling

I did all the modeling in Maya. Modeling the incubator was very simple, nothing tricky. When all the objects are together it seems a bit complex of course, but if you look at them individually they are very simple (Fig.02).


You can see that I have used nothing but boxes, spheres and cylinders with extrude and bevel operations. I also used NURB tubes for the wires and air pipes and some wave typed curves with a revolve operation applied to them to create all of these models.

When these are all put together it looks like this (Fig.03).


The only organic model in this scene was the frog with butterfly wings. I had made a frog in the past so I used this and deleted his legs so I could fit him into the egg easily. I also posed him and gave him a facial expression as if he is amazed to see the new world (Fig.04). With the character put in place the scene looks like this (Fig.05). At this point I was ready to start the texturing.