Sudden insanity on the part of the crew? A mutiny, perhaps? Bad sensor data is always a possibility, but was discounted immediately by the ship’s builders shortly before they filed for bankruptcy and executive protection.

But the truth is, we may never know the cause of the catastrophe, why so many normal, rational people, gave up the will to live and ended it all in the fiery death that ended the last flight of the Star Ship ‘In Search Of Tia`ja’

~Encyclopedia Galactic Trivia, 434th Edition”

Notes:

The derelict ship was created in Vue using a handful of primitives poked into place then grouped into a metablob, an idea Chipp Walters has mentioned a lot recently about his “Speed Painting” thing.

It worked out pretty nicely, although I still need to poke some more to get it to use separate textures on selected primitives.

The other advantage to doing it this way rather than an object seems to be it only took 12 minutes to render the original 6400×4000 master image. The whole thing came in just shy of 7000 polys!

Derelict Hell

The lights on both buildings were created using the same techniques first tested with “Never pick up hitch-hikers“, tweaking volumetric and glow as needed.

Image rendered in Vue.

I Bet You Wish ...

Entire image rendered in-camera using Vue, text added in postwork.

After a recent site design, a new avatar was needed for their Twitter account, as well as for use with Gravatars and other media.

Given the subject matter, I decided to create a Steampunk-based image to use as the base for the avatar(s), with a combination of railroad and road imagery.  For larger image use, I included a city skyline, with mist atmosphere so the distant objects would degrade softly into obscurity at lower image sizes.

DC ParaTransit Info Avatar

Steampunk engine is the SGM Explorer, originally setup in Poser then imported into Vue.  Atmosphere, mist, roadbed, and city skyline all done within Vue.

Those who choose this way of shortening their sentences are shunned from society, encased in a second skin of flexible black rubber, sealed for the duration behind a steel helmet, all of it controlled by their Custodian – a neural AI connected directly into their very brains that monitors their every thought and punishes for the slightest infraction.

The citizens call these outcasts Banes, their banesuit becomes their prison, their Custodian the Warden. Unable to communicate with the outside world, all senses muted, incapable of even feeling their surroundings, banes are a common sight on the streets as they watch a world go by that they can no longer participate in – ignored by most, cruelly persecuted by a sadistic few “bane-bashers”.

Katrina Nichols is a young reporter determined to expose the cruelty of the Banishment Project, and embarks on a journey into banishment to discover the truth about the Banes – but they have a secret of their own they want to keep hidden from the society that cast them out.

Katrina’s path takes her closer to discovering the truth the banes are hiding, a mystery that could lead to her liberation – or her destruction.

Katrina/WInter's Isle

One of my more technically challenging renders.  I don’t really classify this as a combination render of Poser and Vue – it does use the base Victoria 4 figure from Poser, but the only time it saw the inside of poser was for … well, posing.

Once it was imported into Vue, I went to work on texturizing it with a black latex material.  A lot of node editing later, and I finally found the right balance to give it the shiny and ultra-reflective black latex feel I wanted to bring across from the story.

I wanted to recreate the island Katrina calls home in the story, the snowy ground (and the title) being a play on a major arc within the story.  Trying to get it to look right on the screen wasn’t as easy, but I had perfect reference material for snowy ground and trees just by looking outside my window at the remains of the snowstorms at the start of the month!

To wrap it all up, I added a second plane of procedurally-generated city blocks behind the camera so they’d show in the reflections on the banesuit, and threw in some basic global radiosity atmosphere for the lighting, dark clouds to go with the feel of it snowing can just be seen above the city skyline in the distance, and reflected on the helmet.

Postwork needed was minimal, and was done using Photoshop.

Eudemonia and Banes are copyright © 2007/2008 Evil Dolly, the original story can be read here (Warning: Story contains adult situations)

Once that was in place, it obviously had to have a night sky atmosphere added, this one with global radiosity in it, but it also had some basic lights brought in closer to the mauseleum.  A light behind the building with softness and volumetric turned on gave it the strange light-beams effect coming from inside the dome area.

When I brought the resulting image into Photoshop for postwork, it really had some problems with the definition, the lights had almost washed out a lot of the mauseleum itself, so I used the alpha mask I’d created for the building on its own to remove the surrounding terrain from a copy of the background layer, and made that layer overlay at about 40%.  That brought the building nicely into darker focus.

All in all, a fun doodle.

Rendered in Vue, postwork in Photoshop.  Total time to setup including hand-painting the forest ecosystem, 3 hours.  Total render time, 2 hours.  Postwork time, 30 minutes.

Dark Forest Mauseleum

Figures created and posed using Poser, then imported into Vue for the ocean-bed landscape and final render.

Its Lonely At The Bottom

The magic effects were added using Photoshop in post.  The resulting image is after the fold.

Stormbringer

A different test version I did had a little metablob space-ship sat on the landing pad, but I decided against it in the end.

Watching The Seas

For the most part, up until then my concern with lighting was getting the overall scene lights right.  I’d used the point-lights when I rendered the Tumbler from the Batman movies as well, but I wanted to see what else I could do.

So back to Vue, but this time with an entirely Vue-based setup for a castle at night style scene.

Dark Harbor

This one was actually harder than it looked.  Trying to get the point lights to come across as distant fires and beacons, and give the impression of torch-lit battlements, meant a lot of placing the lights in the right place then playing with the color and intensity.

As I went through the lights though, they started giving me ideas for ways to expand on the scene.  It wasn’t originally conceived as being a “harbor”, but the test renders felt too “empty” and I drifted towards adding more into the image at the shoreline.

A quick visit to more Vue buildings gave me the building at the bottom right edge of the shoreline, and some lights in its courtyard brought that up.

Lastly, I added the quayside stretching back from the dock building to the center of the image, and put a beacon light on the end.

So what started as an experiment evolved, the lighting helped to flesh it out and gave it a ton more realism than I expected.  This one is going to end up as one of my “Prints For Sale” when I finally figure out how to set that up on here.