Subnautica Membrain Tree (Fan-Made)

(December 2019)

Just a fan-made recreation of the Membrain Tree from the first Subnautica. This is a very old project, but still seems to be popular when shown to others, so I have decided to include it anyways.

In hindsight, the workflow on this was a very interesting one (not recommended, but interesting). This was a time when I had no access to (and possibly knowledge of) Substance Painter and ZBrush. This meant that this was all modeled within 3ds Max (using soft-select, FFD and similar modifiers, and Max's limited "sculpting"/freeform tools). All the materials were created in Photoshop (using height maps instead of baking out normals, and manual painting instead of procedurals, generators, and noise-maps).
The backgrounds were also interesting. They are just images on planes, placed in the scene, and then I tried to adjust the lighting as best as I could (and warp the planes somewhat) to make them blend with the piece as much as possible (whereas nowadays I would either make an actual 3d scene, or get a neutral render and composite it with the background in Photoshop after the fact).