GATES TO ELYSIUM

Proud winner of the CG Choice Award on CGTalk.com & a Gold Award on CGHUB.com.

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This is my benchmark painting for 2009. Much like my pervious big ones like 'Artificial' or 'Epica' this painting marks something special for me personally and in a technical way. I also used it to check out how much my, currently, new machine can take. I used Vue to render the basic 3d plate. I also rendered each part on a standalone pass. So the ground complex was done within a single Vue file, as well as the ring part. The small ships and the clouds were also rendered with single takes. That gives you the most freedom in the postwork. The hero render with the ground stuctures, landscape took about 28hrs to finish. A first try to render it failed after 8hrs with a corrupt Vue file when i tried to resume the render later. That was fun. All the other elements got rendered in a much shorter time. I also used quite some quality settings for the hero render.

I used DAZ3D Dystopia City blocks to create the structures and techy elements. Before i could use them i had to split the original files apart with c4d to pick me the most interesting models off the pack. Required quite some time. In Vue then i used the models to create the structures. It's much like the modellers who worked on the first starwars movies who did use old battleship modelkits to create their spaceships. I'm doing the same with these 3d models of the buildings. Take something that's already there to create something new. Did that with my 'Epica' painting too but i was not as deep into 3d as i am now. Not saying that i'm a 3d specialist... by - no - means!

Inspiration could be, once again, Mass Effect. I think the lighting, colors and style goes the same direction the game does. It's also my wish to have a chance to see such things with my own eyes. That would be quite a sight i guess. Of course the usual suspects like the Coruscant cityplanet from starwars and other sci-fi movies and books.

Really hope you like what you see.

Intuos3 - Photoshop cs4 - Vue7 - 7hrs Preparation & Concept Phase - 40hrs Rendertime - 20hrs Postwork

Progress Viz: [link]

Print Detail: [link]

Additional material and wallpaper pack: [link]

FULLVIEW RECOMMENDED!