My design of an aquatic space elevator and the imagined process of the transportation of materials from the Earth to outer space. Ascension is a short animation developed in Maya where I attempted to mimic the stark black and white style used within the animated film Renaissance. The way I achieved the black and white look in Ascension was purely through Photoshop, save for the black ocean simulation and gray cloud volumes - those I rendered out separately with their own colors as fluid effects in Maya. After rendering out plain grayscale frames of the geometry in Maya, I batch edited them in Photoshop with adjusted curves and levels to create that stark look. I then combined them with the ocean and cloud frames in Photoshop with the help of a custom layer merging script which also automatically renamed the new composited images. All models, animations, and post-rendering effects were done by myself except for the black and white Earth texture and starfield.

Four layers here: The white background, the gray clouds, the ocean, and lastly the ship.

T'was super fun making the construction worker from scratch. He was developed off of image plane blueprints and then later rigged and skinned completely.

Originally, I wanted to showcase the underside of the transportation facility.