This time using a background environment I built in Vue.
This includes HDR illumination, and is pretty high resolution all the way round, apart from the areas near the top and bottom or the sky/ground which the camera is unlikely to point at…
This is an attempt to do an image in the style of Bruce Pennington. I had in mind as a possible book cover for a new book in A E van Vogt’s series of Null-A novels.
There’s a lot of software used for these two – the landscape was done in Vue, as was the back plate image which was rendered separately.The figure of the emperor was done with Daz Studio, and exported, then the whole lot was pulled together in Lightwave 3d.
I decided to rerender some old Vue scenes from years back, to try new atmosphere’s on them, and see if I’d learned enough to make some useful tweaks.
Here are the results of revisiting a “flooded elven village” scene from many years back…
I’ve now started working through a full “Geek at play” tutorial from SF Epic Landscapes, the Two Moons one.
Initial impressions of the tutorials are somewhat mixed – they seem to assume a basic knowledge of Vue’s Nodes, which I don’t have. And the changes in the software make it very difficult to just copy the buttons to click on, as many have moved around or seem to behave subtly differently…
For all that though, I feel I am getting there. It’s hard work, but I am very pleased with the procedural terrain I was trying to create! This had definite tweaks from the example, which I am fairly pleased with.
The surface was simple, but my interface looked so different I ended up using a canned desert terrain surface preset, and shifting the colour. And all I was truing to do was apply a simple vertical gradient – I have always found Vue surfacing confusing.
One of the great things I really like in vue is it provides an ‘overall’ colour, even for really complex surfaces. And you can shift this to adjust the intensity and shade of the whole shebang with one simple click.
This example also renders really nice and quickly, which makes for fast updating previews, and is very good for tweaking parameters.
Anyway, I’m part way through the tutorial, here are two images from my work on it so far.
I did these images a while back, for a CD by my friend the musician Javi Canovas, “Desert Dawn”.
They were done with the software “Vue”, which delivered its usual mixture of the wonderfully impressive, and the ridiculously frustrating.
Nick