It is with great excitement that I bring to all of you the culmination of the last few months of my work, the MISC portable mining unit. I took on this project to prove to myself, and to a greater extent CIG, that I could create a piece of work that would fit into the rich world of Star Citizen. I wanted to create something that felt completely original that would feel right at home in the Star Citizen universe while also fulfilling its own special role. If you are interested in the process and creation of this video I will go into greater detail later in the post, but without further ado I present to you the MISC portable mining unit. Hello everyone, my name is Nathaniel Ellis, but you can call me Nate, I’m an aspiring 3D artist with a focus on texture and material creation. It is my dream to one day work for CIG developing for such an ambitious project like Star Citizen and Squadron 42. I got my start in the world of 3D art and game development in the fall of 2017 and it quickly became my passion. I would spend most of my free time honing my skills, watching tutorials, and learning new programs looking for the aspect of game development I wanted to focus on. While I love every step of asset creation my true adoration came when I started work in texture creation. The incredibly satisfying ability to breathe life and story into even the simplest of 3D models quickly became my most looked forward to step in the process. This feeling only multiplied when I went into material creation itself. I now not only had the abilities to paint the models, but I could now create the paint itself allowing me to truly make anything I could Imagine. When I first heard about Star Citizen back in 2012 I was enthralled, it was the game I had always imagined as a child playing games like Star Wars: X-wing and Dark Forces. Star Citizen has and will continue to be an inspiration to my work not only for the incredible sci-fi stylings but also for the attention to detail and fidelity they put into every aspect of the game. The portable mining unit was designed as an early introduction to the mining gameplay loop, as opposed to the large scale and capacity mining of something like a Prospector, the portable mining unit offers a smaller package that can be carried to location on foot and deployed by a single user filling one SCU at a time. The first step in any project is collecting reference material. It started simple with grabbing screenshots from SC and moving on to taking color samples to establish the overall look and feel. The next step was modeling, this was straight forward and only took a couple of weeks’ worth of free time in Maya. From there I continued to the animation, I wanted the deployment animation to feel smooth and mechanical but still conduct a sense of ruggedness, the entire animation process only took a couple of days to come up something I was happy with. After the animation was complete I moved on to unwrapping the models and preparing them for texturing. I used references directly from Star Citizen to recreate some of the materials in Substance Designer that I would use in the project. Most of the materials were created over the course of a couple of hours as they were fairly simple and were not the main focus of the scene. Moving onto the drill itself, I brought the models into Substance painter and began to work on texturing them over the course of just under a week. Once everything was finished it was time to setup the cameras and prepare everything for the final render. This turned out to be the biggest time sink, taking over 900 hours of rendering, often resulting in leaving my computer running for weeks at a time, I still don’t think my CPU has fully forgiven me yet. After the great test of my patience that was rendering I was finally able to move onto the postproduction and final assembly of the video. While certainly not my strong suit I was able to quickly cobble together the clips in Premier into something that closely resembled a video. There was however one aspect that was still missing, sound. The audio was certainly the most daunting task as my prior experience in sound creation sums up to exactly zero. Determined to not be deterred I took to the internet and watched some tutorials, over the course of the next week I recorded a myriad of sounds from around my house, ranging from washing machines and dryers to 3D printers and old GameCube controllers. I finally brought them all together and placed them in the video and to no ones surprise it sounded horrible. In the end I broke down and purchased a sound library, I still created and used my own music and kept a few sounds that I had recorded and after a couple of days made something that I was happy with. While certainly what I would consider the weak point of the video I reached a soundtrack that I was happy with for something created in two weeks by someone with no audio experience and after all I couldn’t stand to delay the project any further. Well, I think that about wraps up my short little break down of the project, I hope you all enjoyed and if you have any further questions don’t hesitate to ask. If you would like to view more of my work that is available here at n8ey.artstation.com or you contact me directly with nathaniel.ellis3D@gmail.com. And finally, I will leave you with a few extra renders and see you all around the verse. ---N8ey PS: I apologize for the poor formatting of this post is I managed to quickly exceed the allotted sections. Below i'll post a few miscellaneous images that I couldn't fit higher up in the post.