TIGAER-DESIGN.COM_.v5 – Digital Art by Christian Hecker

Chill Your Base II

I liked that room I created for my “Chill Your Base” piece so much that I decided to do another scene with it. Contrary to the nature background of the first scene I wanted to settle the new scene in a city environment above the clouds. A futuristic penthouse of dreams. Then a new topic/theme for the Aurora artgroup came up and I decided to submit it. Not before I did additional fine tuning to a number of elements. Overall I’m fairly happy with the result.

8000×3652 – Vue – Photoshop – Lightroom – World Machine – Cinema 4d – DAZ Studio

Part of the AURORA: GREEN exhibit

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

A Voyagers End

Since I’ve heard of it the first time, the concept of the in 1977 launched Voyager space probes always fascinated me. Its original objectives included flying by planets and moons of our solar system. Studying and collecting all kinds of scientific details about them and sending them back to Earth. Later I watched Star Trek The Motion Picture and the ideas in that film blew my mind. What these probes have seen and may see at some point really triggers my imagination.

I was watching a webinar by Scappin Matteo about Mandelbulb3d. I got inspired and started to play with the tool. I already did use it in the past but my results were mostly luck. This time I tried to tackle it with more knowledge and control and found something that I wanted to work with. After rendering the scene I moved into Photoshop and combined several passes. While taking a bath I had the idea to add planets. That should end up in an interesting visual you probably don’t see very often. I liked how it turned out and naturally was thinking about adding a space ship. I even already built and rendered one via Vue. After implementing it into the scene it just didn’t work for me though. I couldn’t figure out a good balance between the ship and the environment. Ultimately the ship took a lot of the depth that I didn’t want to miss. Then I had the idea adding something less big. A probe maybe? What about one of the Voyager probes? Heavily inspired by the 1979 Star Trek movie.

The probe solved my storytelling issues and managed to keep a good balance for the mentioned depth. Now, what could that place be? A giant alien megastructure that’s big enough to capture planets. Something that would surely blow me away if I could see that for real!

8000×3652 – Mandelbulb3D – Vue – Photoshop

Part of the AURORA: GREEN exhibit

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

Skyhigh II

Just for fun piece done with the Kitbash3D Utopia set for #BrightArtDarkTimes. No big story behind it. Just having fun, playing with the models and setting up a neat scene. Thanks to #Kitbash3D for making this set available for free!

6000×4000 – Vue – Photoshop – Lightroom

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

Heretic

Started this one quite a while ago, just to play with VDB clouds in Vue. Support for them was just added back then (late 2018) and I felt the urge to play with it. As things go, parts fell into place and I had a neat little project on my hands. Tried a lot of different things, especially with the flying monument. Or whatever it is. I’m not really sure what it is. All I know is that our lady there seems to be not so happy. Summoning all her powers for (maybe?) an attack. There are many ways to read this scene. Technically it was a pure training piece with a satisfying result. Hope you like it too!

7500×5000 – Vue – Photoshop – Lightroom – The Plant Factory – Cinema 4d – DAZ Studio

Regards

Chill Your Base

Last one for 2019, with the right message! Three and a half years I’m having this on my drive now. Waiting. For what? I don’t know. Maybe for that one tick that tells me to let it go. There’s nothing else/more to do on it. That’s what I feel now. I started this project to learn a little more about texturing. UV mapping and all that. Learned a lot, that’s for sure. Composition wise it’s not a bullseye but for every down there’s an up. And that up is the lighting, with which I’m faily happy with. Who wouldn’t want to live there and chill out every once in a while?

8000×3652 – Vue – Photoshop – Lightroom – World Machine – Cinema 4d – DAZ Studio

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

Com-cept 26

Finished this a while ago as part of my Comcept series. I had it on my drive a while and when the Aurora artgroup started a new topic, I figured it would fit nicely. No big story for this one though. Just me having some fun with a spaceship chase scene.

4500×2054 – Vue – Photoshop – Xenodream – Apophysis

Part of Project Aurora: Orange

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

Emma’s Refuge

“There’s a high class party going on somewhere. She needed a break, contemplating to leave or not. She certainly has enough of all these caricatures, throwing around senseless phrases and drowning in mindless smalltalk.”

Although I worked on this for quite a while, it was a rather spontaneous decision to go for it. I downloaded a free promo pack of 3d cyberpunk buildings by Kitbash3d. When I started to convert them to make them work with Vue properly, I naturally played around with the objects. I found a neat angle and I suddenly had a scene in my head. Then I discovered that the fine folks at Kitbash3d made a contest. All you have to do is to use the buildings. “No problem!” I thought! =D

I don’t have many night scenes and took this as a challenge. Cyberpunk needs to be at night and even better with rain! Still, I decided to add a couple of elements you normally don’t see too much in a typical Cyberpunk environment. I fell in love with this scene while working on it and I think it’s easily one of my better pieces.

I noticed the potential of the scene very early on and spent a lot of time with details. I took apart the building objects and kitbashed stuff here and there for additional details. The lady was created with DAZ Studio. I sat down and modified the dress quite a bit and it turned out rather good. That dress on the right kind of woman would surely be a sight to behold. Rendering was quite a chore due to all the lights in the background. I did separate renders for the back and front. Which resulted in tons of passes I combined in Photoshop. So yeah, there were tons of adjustments in Photoshop.

8000×5333 – Vue – Photoshop – Lightroom – Kitbash3D

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

Organica II

Like so many of my works this one started by just playing around. Suddenly that creative spark strikes and one thing leads to another. Needless to say, I’m particularly proud of this one.

Imagine a field trip on an alien planet. There once were these giant bacteria like creatures roaming the surface (because scale doesn’t matter in our universe)… now fossilized. I imagine this place being part of a park much like the Yosemite National Park in the USA.

The giant shapes were created with Xenodream and imported into Vue. There I did setup the overall scene and assembled all the compositional elements. The terrain was done with Geoglyph2 and World Machine. The rocks come from a variety of sources. Mainly Blenderguru and Megascans. A lot of time went into detail work and multiple renders for adding that detail. Later on I had the idea to add some smoke to the bottom of the hole and decided to try myself on cloud modulation in Vue. Took a while to work myself into it but delivered the material I needed to bring in the detail I had in mind.

7000×3784 – Vue – Xenodream – World Machine – Geoglyph2 – Photoshop – Lightroom

Part of Project Aurora “Yellow” – Project Aurora Website

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

Callsign: Firefly

As soon as she entered pilot training school, she was “The Firefly”. Thanks to her skills and relentless will to become the best, that name soon became highly respected among the best pilots in the fleet.

Yep, this one is a pure just for fun piece. A try in doing something ‘portray’ like. I also wanted to dig myself a little deeper into DAZ Studio and its Iray renderer. It delivers pretty neat results and I wanted to know how it works properly with materials and lighting. I didn’t just use a stock figure and tried to create a character myself. Along with modified textures for the character and props. Did have my fun with it and I quite like the result. I guess especially because of the unusual framing of the picture too.

I did use Photoshop for final touch ups. No way around it. Removed some clipping issues and refined the lighting and colours.

6000×2144 – DAZ Studio – Photoshop – Lightroom

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

Calista Square

I started this one years ago and kept it on my drive. Sometimes I tend to keep my stuff laying around for no apparent reason. As if I’m waiting for something. Well, my inner voice tells me to finally release it. It’s scifi cityscape time! It’s certainly been a while since my last one and so far there’s nothing new in the pipeline for now. So this one has to make a splash! It does for me at least and I’m happy to finally share it.

Is there a story to the scene? No. Not really. Inspiration? Yes, sure. Although nothing specific I tried to capture. Still, I wanted to connect this place to my little “Cities Of Linestra” series. Just another city on Linestra, a planet populated with all kinds of cities. Originally it also wasn’t planned to turn this into a project this big. Sometimes these projects decide to take a live of their own and guide you. You cannot just stop there. And yeah, so I added more and more stuff.

However, in the end I was just trying to create a vista/place I would love to see or visit for real. So yeah, I just sat down and had fun. Sometimes that ‘fun’ turned into real ‘work’ but I knew it would pay off at the end. And I was right.

As usual I worked a lot with Vue to bring it all together. But I also used C4D to create variations of model assets I own. You know, to give my scene a more individual look and feel. I think I had this scene done 3 times before I was really calling it done. That is when, having time for your work to grow, pays off. I often need that time. So I ended up adding lots of cool elements I otherwise would have never included into the scene.

I started with rendering a master plate and continued to refine the scene in Vue. That resulted in multiple additional renders that were added piece by piece to the scene in Photoshop. There I changed the overall feel and added some photographic effects. I really enjoy the colours and the overall depth of the scene. Again a picture that allows to dive in, explore and discover new detail each time you risk a closer look.

6500×3514 – Vue – C4D – Photoshop – Lightroom

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards