The Art and Graphics of Nick Stevens. Available for hire.I specialise in unbuilt space projects, and the spacecraft of the Soviet Union.
Planets, real and imagined
Here’s an old CGI model of the planet Mercury I did, based on some maps NASA released using information from the MESSENGER probe to the planet.
The model is in Lightwave 3d format, and available fr free to members of the Foundation 3D forums, in the file area.
One thing I often feel I have difficulty is depicting things out in interstellar space, or other scenarios were it is seriously dark. Not least because with a realistic view, it would be too dark to see anything.
Here’s my latest attempt, showing a rogue planet, cast loose from it’s parent star.
Astronomers seem to be growing towards this having happened early in the hostory of our own solar system, with a 5th gas giant being ejected early in it’s history.
Also note I am using the whole sky environments of our night sky, as mentioned a couple of posts ago.
A rendering of Comet 67P floating over a map of London, to show the true scale of it:
As usual everything done in Lightwave 3d. The old map is used to avoid copyright problems.
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:
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
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.
Pioneer 11 was the first probe to reach Jupiter and Saturn. It is not often remembered, I think because of Voyager 1 and 2 followed on relatively quickly, and these probes delivered much superior imagery.
But Pioneer 11 was important, not least because it established if it would be safe to send the voyagers very close to the giant planets – the amount of radiation and debris near them was not clear before the encounters.
I keep meaning to find the time to learn Modo properly. It’s clearly a powerful and logically laid out piece of software, but I keep falling back on Lightwave which I know so much better.
Here’s a relatively rare Modo item from me, a displacement mapped Moon, (that’s Earth’s Moon, just to be clear!)
A couple of new renders of my old Saturn mesh.
I think I may want to revisit the planet map, and see if I can come up with something of my own – this is by Bjorn Jonsson. The ring maps are based on occultation data from Voyager.
