Dune

Dune
Model: Satiella
Tools used: Blender, Photoshop
Created: February 2024
See the full gallery of Dune here

The planet Arrakis, known as Dune. Land of sand. Home of the spice melange.

For me my love for Dune did not come from the books. Nor from the movies, but from one of the first RTS games ever - you might have guessed it from the quote above: Dune II - The battle of Arrakis. I played that to absolute bits! And loved it! When I then discovered that there were also books and movies I was sold! I loved the odd and weird version from David Lynch, and was really blown away by the 2021 version from Denis Villeneuve. I.. just had to do something with that universe!

Learning Blender again

Blender. Eh.. Okay. Last time, somewhere 2021, it was version 2.8 something, and now we are at 4.0. Nice! Biggest fear: do I still remember how to use it? Or do I have start all over again?

TL;DR Turns out I still knew most of it! Cool!

But nothing beats taking the time to follow a proper course. So, for the environment I started with the sand landscapes from the master 3D enviroments course by CG Boost. Awesome course, and I can recommend it if you want to learn yourself.

For the sandworm I found this free tutorial from Zach Alan / FXHome which helped me get a basic shape + rig to pose it. I initially did this somewhere in 2021, but my attempts at back then dunes were.. problematic. They weren't realistic, nor getting anywhere, and I abandonned the effort due to lack of time. Now, with the second movie about to hit the hype is real and it is time to revisit. Luckily I did save my work, so now I just copied in the resulting rig and modified it to feel more real.

Making it real

Sand isn't perfect. Sandworms aren't either. So time to add imperfections! The worm got lots of dents and bulges semi-based on how I imagine actual worms would move, and based on.. random imagined bruises from crashes I would expect a sandworm to encounter while going at staggeringly high speeds through sand.

The sand got a lot of extra dents, and I added lots of procedural spice dust and sand everywhere. Fun little detail: I remember renders taking like hours to days for a full size properly denoised image with plenty of detail, and that adding any type of volumetric stuff is crazily dangerous to render times. Now.. we are talking minutes. With all included. Good stuff! Yay Blender team for being awesome!

Capturing a Fremen

Of course it would not be a project if there isn't a model included. Turns out Satiella had access to an awesome Fremen cosplay (thanks @mistvein!!), so we did a quick shoot to capture some basic poses for this project. We had limited time, and - obviously - the shoot day was the most dreary dull no sun day one can find in the Netherlands. That actually proved to be useful. No harsh shadows to worry about, and it allowed me to post-light the images as needed.

See below for a few outtakes and process steps, and check Dune for the results!

Thank you for reading!