NightFURY

2110. The US Department of Defense launches the NightFURY project: a spacecraft built to ensure orbital superiority, entrusted to the space division nicknamed “DreamForces”. Its designer, aerospace architect Nicole Market, gives it an aggressive dragon-like silhouette - a weapon of psychological as much as technological warfare, with a matte black coating that absorbs radar waves.

The design crosses Toothless's silhouette (How to Train Your Dragon, DreamWorks) with the industrial aesthetic of Horizon Zero Dawn - the wings are remodeled from the Stormbird - and engines based on SpaceX's Raptor. The ナイト/FURY logo (“Night” in Japanese) and the 01 numbering salute Evangelion: the ship is built in Japan, in Ti-6Al-4V titanium.

On the making side: hand-drawn concepts converted into 3D volumes by AI, clean retopology with QuadDraw in Maya - 902 objects and 1.8 million faces -, Substance Painter texturing (damaged metal, Arnold thin film), and an environment fully built in Houdini: heightfields, vegetation scattering, VDB, and ice FX inspired by Dragons 2, rebuilt from Lucas Janin's breakdowns. Everything assembled in Nuke - alphas regenerated from Z, atmosphere, VectorBlur, birds.

This project also gave birth to EXR Extractor, my first real tool: frame loading in Nuke went from 4 seconds down to 0.3s. Its full page lives in the TOOLS section.