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

Endeavours – I Shall Pass

“Almost there! Like giants protecting a treasure. My wife told me that every tower comes with a different pattern. They suspect that these patterns can even change, which must be quite a sight! I just spoke to her and she suggested not to forget to breathe when seeing the towers up close! The shuttle needs at least 5 more minutes. Very long 5 minutes. Almost home!”

Now this one is a little special as it wasn’t part of the original second leg of artworks for the series and slipped in while I worked on something else and got inspired. I loved the look and scale and definitely wanted to add it to the series as an complementary piece. To show the towers a little more. I was creating a preview piece for my 8k heighfield terrain freebie when inspiration hit me. I liked how the lighting of the scene complimented the detail of the terrain and started playing around by adding the towers. A small stream of light suggests our small little planetary transport pod, zipping through the air. I really wanted to show the dimensions here and the scale works great. I’m also happy how uncomplicated (compared to my other stuff) the scene comes across.

Created, as usual, with Vue, to create a base to work from in Photoshop. I used my freebie The Ghost terrain and its materials and masks to create the landscape. Layout of the scene was done fairly quickly. Invested some detail work here and there nonetheless. In Photoshop I fixed some parts of the render, added some textures and atmospheric effects.

6000×2739 – Vue – World Machine – C4D – Photoshop – Lightroom

Plate

ENDEAVOURS Part One – Six

ENDEAVOURS Part Seven

ENDEAVOURS Part Eight

ENDEAVOURS Part Nine

ENDEAVOURS Part Ten

ENDEAVOURS Part Eleven

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – Drawcrowd – CGSociety

Regards

Endeavours – Port Fenster

“This trip felt like it took 6 years or an eternity! Finally approaching Port Fenster and the town of Valley Call. Imagined it bigger. From what I can see this environment looks very close to what I know from old pictures of the old Earth – except the towers. Look at these towers! They’re gigantic!”

For the most part of our journey we’ve been either in up the air or in space. It’s time to get back to the ground! Here we see our ship in its last appearance during a landing procedure. We see a small town here, which could best be described as a colony. It’s safe to assume that this place is destined to grow quite a bit in the years to come. Therefore I aimed for an established look and not something too fresh. It’s also not the only place we left our mark on here on this planet. There are small settlements all over the place. But this little town is one of the main places, managing the colonization process and all that comes with it. Although not everyone is allowed to just apply for a home there. This planet demands a more selective process. At least for now.

For the scene I used Vue and some assets I bought via DAZ. I modified these assets so they helped me building this little town. It works good enough but I’m not super entirely happy with it. Which goes in line with the more experimental approach of the pieces in this series. Some things work better than others. =) The mountains/landscape was created via World Machine. “This alien planet looks kinda like Earth!”, you say? Yes, it does… there’s a reason for it I hope to explain in an upcoming series of images. For the foreground I used some HQ trees made by Aron Kamolz. Thanks buddy! =)

4500×2054 – Vue – World Machine – C4D – Photoshop – Lightroom

Plate

ENDEAVOURS Part One – Six

ENDEAVOURS Part Seven

ENDEAVOURS Part Eight

ENDEAVOURS Part Nine

ENDEAVOURS Part Ten

ENDEAVOURS Part Eleven

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – Drawcrowd – CGSociety

Regards

Endeavours – Towers Of Entropy

“We started the descend and entered the outer atmosphere. I remember from history class how the first ‘Astronauts’ always had a pretty rough ride through the atmosphere, down to the good old Earth. Now it’s a smooth transition. We still have to fasten our seatbelts though. Must be a traditional thing. And there they are, the mysterious Towers of Entropy. Can’t wait to learn more about them!”

For this one I decided to go for a more loose style. Main objective was to visualize the ship approaching the lower parts of the atmosphere of this planet. As well as showing the celestial environment with the planets. It may be a little cliche but I wanted our planet/destination to not just be a random planet. Since I plan to continue this series at some point. So I decided to add these towers. At this point we know nothing about them and I haven’t even mentioned them in the previous parts. So I hope to spawn some more interest by the sudden reveal of this element. Even though I’m not entirely sure where I want to go with them yet, I plan to investigate them at some point for sure.

Technically it’s a very basic scene. In Vue I rendered a plate for the landscape and an additional plate for the clouds. I tried working without clouds but the pic felt off. With the added cloud elements it came together much better. Especially the scale started to look more impressive. Photo textures and painting enhanced the scene. In Lightroom I found a nice colour landscape to go with as well as adding a grain effect which I really liked for this one.

4000×2163 – Vue – C4D – Photoshop – Lightroom

Plate

ENDEAVOURS Part One – Six

ENDEAVOURS Part Seven

ENDEAVOURS Part Eight

ENDEAVOURS Part Nine

ENDEAVOURS Part Ten

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – Drawcrowd – CGSociety

Regards

Endeavours – Anticipation

“There was nothing but darkness! I heard stories of ships that never made the passage complete. Poor souls. The captain just did let us know the passage went fine and we are about to enter the atmosphere. I always wondered why the passage costs the traveler a week though. It felt like just a second. However, the passangers started cheering and clapping. Guess I wasn’t the only one wetting his pants.”

For this one I was playing around a little more than usual. There are a couple of ways to read this image. At least to me. This wasn’t planned though. First after I got done with most of the work for it, I recognized that there is probably more going on than I thought. However, the main goal was to find a way to illustrate how that ship we’re following since the beginning of the series, drops out or exits the jump gate. I played with a couple of ideas and ended up with what we can see now. The slight blue glow on the bottom was added to suggest that we are about to enter the atmosphere of the planet that will lead us to the finish line of this part of the series.

Technically it’s again business as usual with using Vue to layout and render the scene. Photoshop to bring together the rendered material and detailing elements. Lightroom helped me find a nice colour composition since, in all honesty, the plain Photoshop result looked kind of boring. So I went through Lightroom twice until I got the colours I was happy with.

8000×5333 – Vue – C4D – Photoshop – Lightroom

Plate 1
Plate 2
Print Detail

ENDEAVOURS Part One – Six

ENDEAVOURS Part Seven

ENDEAVOURS Part Eight

ENDEAVOURS Part Nine

ENDEAVOURS Part Ten

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – Drawcrowd – CGSociety

Regards

Endeavours – A Promise In Light

“Oh wow, I guess this city is a big one! And there is the gate to a new life. I have never done a trip through one of those. Even thinking about the science and xeno-technology that goes into it makes me feel dizzy. See you on the other side!”

When starting this series in 2011 I definitely wanted to show a megacity from farther away (an almost orbital level). Unfortunately my PC power wasn’t strong enough to really do it back then without having it super complicated in the post work stage. What I did instead was my ‘Leaving The Fields Of Steel‘ piece. Which comes close to the original idea I had in mind. And also worked better with the first part of the series showing the progression of the transition from surface level to space.

Now, with a little more power under the hood, I had the opportunity to move farther away and play more with the city and the scale a bit. The ship is about to enter a portal or jump gate. The technology for this isn’t necessarily ours. In this world we discovered an ancient old alien technology and decrypted/reverse engineered it enough to make use of it to a certain extent. Old idea, I know. =) I don’t want to define what year all this plays in but what I can say is that the alien technology is in our arsenal for quite a while now. But by no means do we fully understand it.

The challenge here was to find a good camera angle and some nice landscape shapes that compliment city details. I admit that the overall composition isn’t exactly amazing and the city is pretty far away. My main goal of suggesting a nice sense of scale works good enough for me though. So I am rather happy with the outcome since I did not want to repeat what I already did with ‘Leaving The Fields Of Steel’.

I started developing the scene by opening the Vue scene file of the ‘Leaving The Fields Of Steel’ piece in Vue. I made a bunch of copies of the city and refined parts of it by placing several buildings in different parts of the city. To make it look not too uniform. But before I fully tackled the city I created an infinite terrain (which I haven’t used much yet) for the landscape and looked for a sweet spot to place my city on. I definitely wanted it to sit on a coast. Found a good spot and moved around the city parts. After rendering the scene I did some extensive work on adding life to the city by adding lights. Also added the clouds, which makes the scene look much more natural. I originally tried it without clouds. Just didn’t look right. The jumpgate was done with kitbashing a number of models I already had. I’m fairly happy with how it turned out at well.

6000×2888 – Vue – C4D – Photoshop – Lightroom

Plate
Print Detail

ENDEAVOURS Part One – Six

ENDEAVOURS Part Seven

ENDEAVOURS Part Eight

ENDEAVOURS Part Nine

ENDEAVOURS Part Ten

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – Drawcrowd – CGSociety

Regards

Endeavours – Forget The Way We Lived

“It’s finally happening. Barely sleeped last night. Boarded the ship that will take me to my loved ones. My new home. Can’t wait to get there. Can’t wait to welcome that new life. The view from up here is stunning. It really gives perspective. I wonder, will I miss this place?”

In 2011 I started an open ended series of pieces, trying to tell a (even though really basic) open ended story. These were done for The Luminarium. The artgroup had picked a topic for their 15th release which was titled ‘Sequential‘. So I tried myself in creating pictures that could also be comic panels. Now we have 2017 and I finished the second part. Again I used this project to play around and try a couple of new things. Some more, some less successful.

So I took off where I left so many years ago by opening up the scene file I kept of the space station. As usual I used a Vue render as a plate and took it into Photoshop. There I added textures and played around with it quite a bit. I did not work super pixel perfect and wanted to keep it a little rough. I wasn’t happy with it for a long time. I originally approached it by going with a widescreen/cinematic format. Whatever I tried, nothing convinced me. Since the point of this whole series is to play around and try new things, I tried rotating the image. Suddenly it worked for me. I understand that it’s probably a taste thing and the overall composition is very unconventional. But rotating it 90° counter clockwise was the solution I needed. Last but not least I moved the picture into Lightroom and fiddled with the colours. Ended up with a high saturated mix that really worked for me. So in the end the piece does have a rather unusual format and I thought about cutting parts on the bottom, but ultimately decided against it.

Hope you enjoy the view too. Let’s see where it leads us!

4500×2054 – Vue – Photoshop – Lightroom

ENDEAVOURS Part One – Six

ENDEAVOURS Part One – Six

ENDEAVOURS Part Seven

ENDEAVOURS Part Eight

ENDEAVOURS Part Nine

ENDEAVOURS Part Ten

Plate 1
Plate 2

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – Drawcrowd – CGSociety

Regards

The Invitation Pt.1

The first one for 2017 is an experiment from early last year and something quite different from my usual stuff. Normally I focus on the environments and add characters to make these environments feel alive. So they are usually just an addon. With this one I wanted to focus on a character instead of the environment. Without making the environment too boring though. I must also admit that I did not sculpt the lady by hand. I used DAZStudio for it. So I definitely admire people who can do that stuff from scratch. However, I did not use a DAZ pose or character preset! There went a lot of work into posing and the proportions of that lady. Tons of testrenders for lighting setup and material checking. A lot of detail work that went into this lady. I wanted this to by sexy, treating the pic like a fine art nude photo shoot of sorts. Everything as tasteful as possible, without it to appear too ‘revealing’. Hope I got that part right.

Technically the figure and its pose was done in DAZ Studio and then exported for use in Vue. There I did some heavy material tweaking and tried to get the light right. The render happened in 9000×6000 and even if it is a quite simple scene, there went some extra time into the Photoshop process. Mainly to fix things and to overpaint small areas. I also rendered multiple passes of the scene and even worked with an HDR pass. The latter helped to get the skin tones right. In the last stage of creating this one, Lightroom helped me to get the colour I had in mind right.

This pic is the first one in a three part series. And, probably the best one. But that is a definite taste thing. :D

9000×6000 – Vue – DAZ Studio – Photoshop – Lightroom

Print Detail

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – Drawcrowd – CGSociety

Regards

A New Threat

“Many Bothans died to bring us this information”.

If you grew up with the original trilogy then this sentence may have spawned a whole movie on its own in your head. =D

Well, I guess you can call this piece ‘Fanart’. To celebrate Rogue One I wanted to try myself on something that has its roots in one of the biggest franchises ever created. Instead of going the obvious route and create something that fits the new movie, I wanted to create a fictional scene you could imagine maybe happening between Episode 5 and 6. Two rebel agents spying out the still under construction Shield Generator that protects the second Death Star.

I started this scene quite some time ago and figured it would be worth the wait and release it when Rogue One is out. After having it at a ‘pretty much done’ stage for a while, I even went back and fixed quite a few elements and invested some extra time to make it look more passable in certain areas. Mainly tree stuffs. As always there are parts I’m not entirely happy with but overall I think it works.

The scene was created with a variety of tools. Mainly Vue to arrange and compose the scene. Sculptris was used to create a ground foundation. The Plant Factory was used for the trees. Thanks to Aron Kamolz for some tips there. Photoshop was used to overpaint, fix and add details. Last but not least I used Lightroom to find the right mood for the colours.

Vue – Sculptris – Worldmachine – The Plant Factory – Photoshop – Lightroom – 6571×3000

The Star Destroyer, Speedbikes and Shield Generator models are from Scifi3d.com.

Print Detail

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – Drawcrowd – CGSociety – Behance

Regards

Frontier

This time we have a collaboration piece between me and Alastair Temple. He’s a fellow artist from the Luminarium artgroup and mostly into Photography. Every now and then he’s going Scifi or Abstract. Here he combined his abstract technique with some neat scifi and asked me to add some additional magic as well. It mainly the space station. I also added some additional detail to the alien structures and worked on the composition a bit. In the end we both created individual versions of the scene.

I had my fun with this one and the weirdly shaped looking structures add a nice sense of mystery to the whole thing. What specifically these are you ask? I have no clue. I leave that to your imagination. :)

Mandelbulb – Vue – Photoshop – Lightroom – 4000×2000

Find Alastair’s version and a little background info on Behance
Find his Website here: http://www.alastairtemple.co.uk/

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – Drawcrowd – CGSociety – Behance

Regards

Greenland II

Here we have just 4 fun piece. Just wanted to test some rock assets in a neat nature scene. While playing around it clicked with me and I had a really nice lighting setup. I wanted to use it and invested some extra time into the scene. Not too much though since I just wanted to play and test around for fun. =)

Vue – Photoshop – Lightroom – 5000×2812

Had my fun with this one and hope you enjoy the view. :)

Wireframe

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – Drawcrowd – CGSociety

Regards