Max van der Ree

Pastel Color Study

This space station was used as a base for all SpaceX crewed interplanetary flights during the 2040′s and ‘50s. It was later replaced by several larger stations to meet the needs of the rapidly growing interplanetary traffic. In line with SpaceX’s philosophy, the station was not simply discarded, but put to a new use. A BFR block 2 tanker ship boosted the station into lunar orbit, where it was used as an unmanned shuttle platform from which mostly unmanned flights to and from the lunar surface were performed.

Using photobashing, I made this portrait with an illustration as reference.

The depot was permanently abandoned when propulsion by nuclear fusion became commercially viable in the late 21st century, and traditional chemical engines could not compete. However, passing ships continued to receive welcoming signals from the station’s automatic radio transmitters until the year 2124, making this fuel depot the longest-operational unmanned space station to this day. 

made with pencil and photoshop

New pastel drawing. Drawn from imagination. Edited in photoshop.

Designs for an industrial chicken-like robot that contains both organic and mechanical parts.

Made this flower pastel drawing a few months ago. Something I noticed while making these drawings was that the colors are not as bright as I wanted, so I got some new, softer pastel sticks which create brighter colors.

Practicing pastel drawing. Drawn from a reference painting by Peter Durieux.

Some WIP stills of my upcoming animated short ‘The Heavens’

Simulation Helper: my latest Maya tool. This script lets you try out many different settings for Maya Fluids and nParticles, and makes a playblast for each setting. After it’s done, you can choose which playblast you like best, and re-apply the appropriate setting. 

I want to give credit to Anoop Madhusudanan, who wrote an article (https://www.codeproject.com/articles/14342/designing-and-implementing-a-neural-network-librar#3.2%20Artificial%20%20Neurons) about neural networks which I used as a tutorial for how to make my own network. 

pastel + photoshop

A Maya script I wrote which makes renaming large amounts of objects easier. Can also be used to add prefixes and/or suffixes. 

Rocket engine simulation made with Maya Fluids. The sims are getting better, although I’m not yet happy about the shape. I was aiming for something like this image (which is a photo of a test firing of SpaceX’s new Raptor engine).

This script allows you to filter for object types, specific object names, their iterations, or a sequence of characters inside the name.

A script which converts normal keyframes into keyframes driven by a control attribute.