Daedalus Update

Two new images showing the BIS Daedalus interstellar design. These will be used in a book by Michael Carroll, to be published later this year.

One image shows the immense size of the unmanned craft, with the two stages separated, and a Saturn V rocket beside it for comparison. This is in the header.

The second shows the whole thing assembled, below, against a backdrop of stars. Click for a larger view.

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Planet X

This was inspired by the announcement from Prof Mike Brown that he was on the trail of a new ice giant planet, way, way beyond Pluto.

This was revealled by some unusual allignments on the orbits of several Kuiper Belt objects.

For the art, the challenge was to show something clearly, while giving an impression of almost total darkness. Here’s what I came up with:

Planet X
Artists impressionof the possible giant planet in the far outer solar system.

The rich star background is there to imply a very long exposure.

I gave the planet a ring. While the material that far out is sparse, the planets gravity would be completely dominant, while the influence of the Sun would be tiny. For the same reason, I would expect it to have many small moon’s, (not shown).

Nick

The Frost Giant

A finished piece, with fairly heavy use of photoshop, to combine the different elements. Shadow for the figure was scribbled in manually.

Landscape and sky were rendered separately, everything in Lightwave 3d as usual. I’m not used to working sith such a restricted colour pallette, but I am very pleased with the results!

The planet object is available for full users of Foundation 3d, in Lightwave format.

 

Soyuz Capsule Mesh

No updates for a while, but there are some new one to go in!

I recently bought a Russian Soyuz capsule mesh on TurboSquid. The textures didn’t really come in at all, (not unusual in my experience), but it was fairly straightforward to apply new ones, as surfaces were sensibly named. I was also really pleased to see that the orange seams were done with geometry!

Here are a couple of new renders, where I composited the mesh over Earth, using NASA photos taken from the ISS.

As usual, all of this is done in Lightwave 3D.soyuz-ascendingx

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