Re-creating Blofeld's Oil Rig - Story of the process!

One of my biggest goals with this project is of course having to create a large number of sets for the animated scenes to take place in. By far one of the most difficult ones is the exterior of Blofeld's Oil Rig, which appeared in the climax of the original Diamonds Are Forever film.

To begin with, I used this diagram sketch found online as a guide to the overall layout. Anything that wasn't on it I could always go back and look at the film to check details.

Next, I spent months attempting to re-create the Rig in the modelling software Sketchup - it wasn't as difficult as it sounds as Sketchup's 3D Warehouse contained plenty of 3D assets that I could either use or modify to work with my model.

What you see here is the result of all that work:

Naturally it's not a 100% re-creation as there are several minor details of which I had no idea of how to replicate (mostly small bits of machinery that I don't know the name of) but it didn't matter as the model looked great and suitable enough to stage some action on.

However, by far the main challenge with this set was actually getting it into Moviestorm. You see, there's a limit of about 21000 polygons in a model that the software will accept if you're trying to import a Sketchup model into it.

Not only that, but it needs to be an older file type to the current version of Sketchup, so I had to dig up an older version just to get the correct file type.

Since the model as a whole totals to over Five-Hundred Thousand polygons, I knew it would be impossible to convert the whole thing. 

So what was the solution? Simple - break it up into individual pieces like a Lego set and import them one at a time. That way once I had all the pieces in Moviestorm I could re-build the Oil Rig in much less time.

And this here is the final result:

As you can see, it's mostly the same as the Sketchup model. Some parts didn't make it through the rendering process but there were plenty of substitutes in Moviestorm that made up for them. The only real casualty was the Rig's main body, which lost part of its geometry on an edge so I had to fill it in.

But finally, it's all complete and ready for some key scenes in the finale to be animated. Till then!