|
The ship is modeled entirely in Blender. Every time I work on this ship I end up adding more and more detail. This time I added some more textures to the protruding elements on the ship, plus I added a bump map to the texture on the sphere of the ship.
I had just download Blender version 2.49 and gave it a go. The rendering seemed a lot faster, about 1.5 minutes for a 2000 x 1500 image. That was with the Blender internal rendering engine. I noticed that they seem to have removed the Yafray rendering engine from the program. I skipped over version 2.48 so it could have been gone from there as well.
Anyway, after rendering, I brought it into Photoshop for some post-processing.
Sometimes I try to get away from the standard 3D look, and I try to make these Commander Series pieces a bit more artistic, a little more hand painted, I guess.
To that end, I usually will apply some filters to the art, among these are the Angled Strokes and Find Edges filters.
The background is a re-worked background from the Hubble telescope site. Sometimes even as stunning as those images are, I want to make them a bit more vivid, so I might blast the levels and the saturation on it until they are a little bit out of control. I like to see some strong contrast in those backgrounds.
Of course, I added in the lens-flare to top it off, and then the Commander Series logo to finish it.
The Commander Series will be an ongoing webcomic on this site once I finally get the first episode rendered. The problem is that I'm doing that one mostly in Daz Studio, and damn, that program is SLOW. It's actually a bit shameful.
Once I get my figure modeling perfected in Blender I'll most likely never pick up Daz again. It's free, but it's just too slow and painful to work with.
Anyway, just let me know if you have any questions with this one.
|
Comments
I also like how the lens flare is aimed down, giving the reader the sense that they are looking up at a large craft of a ship, as opposed to looking down at something smaller.
It really adds to the majesty and overall size of the ship. I think without the lens flare it still would have been an excellent piece, but by adding it, it gives a sense of disbelief which is always needed with any sci-fi piece.
Very well done.