Vue scenes of Mars

Martian Horizon

I’m still experiementing with Vue, and I’m begining to feel like I am getting somewhere. And somewhere a bit more interesting than just a bunch of CGI sunsets!

Mind you, this one started as a sunset with an interesting terrain. It was when I figured the scene was rather Mars-like, that I got the idea for what else to include beyond the terrain and the sky.

So I dug out my old “Mars Habitat” and “Mars Explorer” from Daz, and loaded them in.Now the habitat had some odd rendering issues in Lightwave, but seems OK in Vue, at least once I had turned off glare.

It’s also become clear that Vue does a MUCH better job of preserving halfway decent surface settings when importing from OBJ format than from an LWO format. (For some reason Lightwave 3d surfaces only seem to respond to ambient light, the diffuse does nothing?!)

Explorer walking at dusk on a Mars like world.
Explorer walking at dusk on a Mars like world.

I could have made it Mars, but I really wanted that big knobbly moon in the sky!

I’ve noticed I have a bad habit of almost always filling the field of view with the subject, so I’m trying conciously to have a distant subject more often.

This next image developed in a series of steps. I started out by examining an eroded terrain I bought. It was all a bit extreme, so I scaled the hight right down, hoping for some interesting detail on something a bit flatter.

Sandy eroded terrain test
Sandy eroded terrain test

I applied a sandy texture, and it all looked nicely credible. Incidentally, the skies are from a set of Cloudscapes by Dick Scherzinger I bought, the most convincing clouds I have seen in Vue. Slow to render but worth it!

Brownish sands again made me think of Mars, so I set about making myself a nice Mars environment for future use.

Mars terrain test
Mars terrain test

Very slight wispy clouds, a nice rough reddish desert! Lighting will clearly need adjusting to suit, but that’s no big deal.

As luck would have it, the very next morning, Winchell Chung, (of the awesome site Atomic Rockets), pointed me at the free NASA exploration vehicle object:

https://nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov/detail/nmss-sev

Perfect as a Mars rover!

That imported without need for further work, and I quickly added my Mars astronaut. Why has he stopped and got out? Not eactly realistic, but I decided to add a small green plant, growing on the plains of Mars!

Plant and rover on Mars
Plant and rover on Mars

And that’s the finished image.

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