Introduction

Hi, everybody! I'm Matt Burdette, an environment artist working in San Francisco, and in this Making Of I'm going to walk through the process of creating Blast Core, which is a CG project I put together last winter. It was inspired predominantly by techno music and Werner Herzog documentaries.

Every project is a huge learning experience for me, and I learned quite a bit by doing this one. It's probably all a lot of stuff you already know, but just in case, I'm mainly going to try to cover all the major steps, tips, tricks, work-arounds, and what-have-yous that helped this piece come together.

Pre-production

For Blast Core, I really wanted to create a piece of fantastic machinery that also had very direct analogues in realism. Specifically, in the case of the laser drill, I saw the opportunity to combine a few different pieces of actual real-world hardware into something not very real-world at all. While I generally do a few little cursory sketches on the backs of late night diner napkins, the most formative part of the process winds up being just collecting an obscene amount of reference from a multitude of places and then kit-bashing styles together. For Blast Core, this was definitely the way to go: the tripod legs being reminiscent of surveying equipment and industrial drilling rigs, and the actual drill device pretty much being directly influenced by an exposed jet engine.

I'm also totally fascinated with Antarctica as an environment, and how research outposts are set up there. It reads to me as being the closest real-world example of a colony on an alien planet (Fig.01 – 03).