Black lake pt 2

I had a look through these:

And decided to make a tower in the middle of the lake and even got quite far with it:

The idea is that there's some kind of a building in the middle of the lake and it's getting covered with vegetation and somebody's trying to repair it. However there's something I don't like about it and I can't quite come up with a good story for it.

So I came across these:

 

http://www.criteriondg.info/wordpress/uploads/scott-wills.jpg

and thought I could make a dome where the opening of the lake is. I was struggling to figure out how to make a believable rock mesh.

Devil's causeway in Ireland has these six angled basalt towers. Because they sit next to one another perfectly if I can just make one and and make a nice composition of its uv mapped duplications. I get away with minimum uv mapping and the whole scene will be easy to manage.

I can't really draw this out so I've been sketching on maya.

It's still very rought but proves my point. The six angle blocks look believable and give the scene a nice surreal touch.

Black lake

My environment idea is making the lake that the grabmobiles explore. The lake is sort of a God for the creatures living around it, kind of like the Mathmos in Barbarella. In the movie the Mathmos is a lake underneath the city. The lake is pure energy in liquid form.

The Black lake is powerful and must be nursed to keep it happy. The submarines explore the lake to make sure there's nothing wrong. Most of the lake is underground and it looks black due to lack of light. The submarines are also black so they wouldn't disturb the lake.

I'm making the entrance to the lake. The lake is in the middle of a desert in some kind of a strange canyon.

http://www.destination360.com/north-america/us/utah/images/s/bryce-canyon-area.jpg

http://science.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGS/Shared/StaticFiles/Science/Images/Content/glen-canyon-999420-sw.jpg

Deserts have some beautiful and very distinctive colours and light. It's all blue and orange.

http://www.jon.hinchliffe.name/graphics/rd%20arches-1morning.jpg

This one sort of explains my texture idea for the submarine:

http://www.strangemilitary.com/images/content/138621.jpg

Crabmobile

I was trying to model the jellyfish thing by making plates that would fit together. However the model just didn't look that nice and trying to fit the different plates next to eachother was really difficult. I did some studies with different sea creatures and came up with this oyster/calmar design:

So I've made the sideplates:

I just need to figure out the cockpit:

I'm going witt something like the second one. This one was just made quickly out of a sphere and it isn't that polygon efficient or even that nice. However what I do like about it is how it looks kind of like you mixed something very organic into a machine.

What I still have to figure out as well is the backside. Like in the original sketch it has a couple of plates there as well. However they still need some fitting because to me this just looks really random at the moment.

I also need to concider the textures. This is some kind of a deepwater submarine/stealth ship. I'm thinking of making it all in black and making the shape come out with light/lighter bits like in my original idea.