Piter's Arrival - The Harkonnen Tram sequence

One of the more poorly edited sequences in the movie revolves around Piter De Vries arrival at the Harkonnen capital by tram. As depicted in the movie it is a really confusing set of shots which also includes some terrible compositing and blue screen work.
Only the final shot with the matte painting of the interior of the massive industrial complex is well done.
To this end I have been working away on building the two major features from that sequence - the massive industrial building and the creepy "oil burners" with the strange baby faces which are barely seen in the movie.
This is an update on what I had previously done in an attempt to make it more "movie" accurate given what references I have of it.
Still a lot of work to be don on it to match the model better and the face is nowhere near correct yet, but the elements are starting to come together.

Just for fun I decided to make some card back mock ups for "Dune SE" action figures, using a modified version of the original Kenner star wars card back - since I always felt those were some of the best looking action figure card backs.
Also found some pictures of the original LJN action figures and some custom made ones.
There are different colour backgrounds depending on which faction they belong to.

PREVIZ: Folding Space: Interior

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0oJ6LgutsQ

Here is some early "Previz" animation I have been working on to try and work out a better way to handle the scenes of Guild Navigator folding space.
I would like to try and stay close to what was originally envisioned for the sequence, while keeping what is going on clear to the audience.

Sardaukar Lasgun

As a follow up to the Sardaukar pistol I made recently, here is the Lagun / Rifle. It's a fairly low rez model with only basic texturing, not meant to be viewed up close, but should hold up fine for distant shots on the CG Sardaukar.

I only had the one reference image to work from (The prop looks pretty beat up as well), so it is probably missing details. If anyone has better images of the prop, I'd be interested in seeing them. A search of the net revealed nothing new.

SARDAUKAR PISTOL/LASER GUN

Just finished up a low resolution version of the Sardaukar pistol - for use by eventual CG Sardaukar - so I didn't include some of the smaller details, though I may add them later.
To My knowledge this prop doesn't appear in the film, nor have I found any examples of it as concept art. However, it WAS a toy made by LJN (Called the Sardaukar Laser Gun) along with the Fremen Tarpel Gun (Which seems to have been based on the concept art for the Fremen needle gun) - Next will be the Sardaukar Lasgun/Rifle you can see in one of the examples below (along with the pistol).

An reanalysis of David Lynch's DUNE

It's an older review by John Kenneth Muir of the Blu-ray from 2010, but it is always interesting to see other people's opinions and experiences with the film.

http://reflectionsonfilmandtelevision.blogspot.com/2010/06/cult-movie-review-dune-1984.html

On a tragic note, My friend Paul Michelena was killed this weekend in a supermarket parking lot, hit and run over by a car while protecting his daughter Chani (Yes, Paul was a DUNE fan as well).
Water for the dead will be given at the appropriate time.

http://www.sanclementetimes.com/blog/2013/10/11/man-killed-by-car-in-grocery-store-parking-lot/

Thirdly, I finally spent the weekend back working on DUNE Special Edition again... mostly sorting out all My 3D assets - since the organization has been haphazard at best and working in the VFX industry for the past couple of years has taught Me a thing or two!

Guild Heighliner - HD Redux

So I have decided to sort of start over - after a fashion - in as much as I am starting at the beginning again and retooling everything for the greater detail demands of HD. Means more work of course!

Have never been happy with the level of detail on the Guild Heighliner, so I have been working out how to use the new "instancing" features in Lightwave 11.5 to create a good look. Had to remodel the ship to accommodate the way instancing works. I also have not added in the node flow that allows the instances to rotate in 90 degree increments for more variety.

Here's a couple of in progress comparison shots... Same model with instancing turned off and instancing turned on. (It's not lit properly yet though and I will eventually play with the surface textures when I have finished modeling - still have to do the three large vertical doors)

Atreides Soldiers

Now that Lightwave has instancing and I've been able to get a reasonable grip on it, I can now continue working on the "Atreides Departure" scene I had started a while ago but could never work out a way to populate the scene with enough "people".

Rather than waste a lot of time modeling from scratch I grabbed an old Imperial Officer model from the Jedi Academy game (An enhanced version modeled by HapSlash) - since he has almost the same uniform I needed. I then modified and hacked this starting point to more closely resemble the uniform in the film... and in doing so noticed a cool little detail I had never seen before... the wardrobe dept outdid themselves by creating a whole ranking system for the Atreides troops...

I also noticed one shot (the only one on Caladan) where there was an alternate uniform with a sort of greatcoat.
Still have to finish the hats, the alternate uniform and getting some different heads and head textures in there...
I also modeled a low rez pistol and rifle for the soldiers as well.

3rd Stage Guild Navigator - Revised Design

Well, My Z-Brush skills are getting a little better so decided to tackle the 3rd Stage Guild Navigator... While I was at it, I decided to tweak the design a bit more. In the novel the Navigators are humans mutated through their addiction to the spice melange. The movie creature was interesting and I like the head, but the body basically said "alien" not "mutated human" and since you rarely ever see anything of him other than his head until the folding space scene, I thought that I could "get away" with doing a revision to the original design.

Here is the untextured, un re-topologized version as it currently stands...

I think I may "stretch out" the body a bit... still tinkering with it. Need to add more detail too.

CALADAN LANDING FIELD - update

Here is an update on the Caladan Landing Field.
Everything is still in progress but SLOWLY coming together (Working on a SyFy channel original movie right now so time is very limited).
I still think I prefer the crystals to the fountains though but will have to see how each looks.