The Slabship / Fury – Development and finished renders

An unusual one for me, as I take a crack at an original science-fiction design.

My objective was to  get something seriously large, primarily for use in Vue. My thinking is that I notice many great concept art pages have fairly abstract ships that are so big the more distant parts are afffected by haze, giving a great sense of scale. And as volumetric effects are a strength of Vue, I figure model in LW with Vue in mind. In practice this meant:

  • Keep the number of different surfaces low
  • Avoid clever effects that I don’t know how to do in Vue, including advanced surfaces
  • Avoid elements that would give a clear idea of scale, such as windows, hatches, stairs
  • Make it a long design so it’s easy to get the most distant parts lost in fog

Continue reading “The Slabship / Fury – Development and finished renders”

More test renders of All Sky Maps from the ESO

Some more test renders of the al sky maps made available by the European Southern observatory. The level of detail is amazing!

Take a look at this high res render for example, and be sure to look at maximum resolution! (For most this will mean one click to see the image full screen, and another to go to full size).

high-resJust awesome! Continue reading “More test renders of All Sky Maps from the ESO”

Test renders of all sky map from the ESO

I found these wonderful images made available by the European Southern Observatory:

http://www.eso.org/public/images/archive/category/fulldome/

Some are VERY high resolution!

So I tried applying one to the inside of a sphere, set to 100% luminous, no diffuse, and used a 1080P camera with AA set to 25. I* used planar mapping on the Y axis.

These images are what I got out. The only adjustments I made were autocontrast.

I think they would look even better if I darkened them a bit.

As usual, click on an image to see it full size. skyball_rgb030 Continue reading “Test renders of all sky map from the ESO”

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.