[Animation Scene] Asteroid Field - Creating the asteroids

This blog post will the first in a series of posts detailing the creation of my 30 second animation scene from start to finish. This first post covers the creation of my space "skydome" and creating some asteroid assets to be used later to populate the sky with asteroids. To begin I created a sphere to use as a skydome, I then went to the "Mesh Display" menu and reversed the faces so that the inside faces are texturable.

I also went into the attributes for the shape component of the skydome and made sure to turn off it's ability to cast and receive shadows as this would affect the scene in a way I wouldn't want. 

Next, I applied my space texture that I found online. Applying it by default I found it appeared very stretched, almost like it was smeared across the shape at a low resolution. The solution to this issue was to make sure that inside the "place2dTexture" component of the texture file I set it to repeat the UV of the texture over 8 times on the X and 5 times on the Y axis. This made the texture repeat seamlessly across the sphere shape and appear much higher resolution as you can see below.

With the space skydome in place I now turned my attention to creating some asteroid assets to populate my asteroid field with. I decided to create a low poly asteroid shape as I would be populating my scene with hundreds of them and this allowed me to keep the render efficient. To create a basic "low poly" asteroid shape I started with a cube shape and then used the "smooth" tool. This effect tries to smooth all the corners from this cube, creating a rock shape that was a good basis for my asteroids.

With this basic rock shape created I then grabbed some of the vertices and dragged them out to create a more jagged rock effect, similar to an actual asteroid.

To finish the effect I applied an asteroid rock texture that I found online. I applied this texture as a blinn instead of lambert in order to give it a bit of a shine with my lighting in the scene, making them appear a bit more detailed. I also added the asteroid texture as a bump map in order to give the surface of the rock a bit more depth.

With the first base asteroid created, I then duplicated the object twice and edited the shape of the new asteroids by dragging the vertices around a little bit to create 3 different types of asteroids.