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

Comcept 31 – Battle For New Cydonia

This one actually belongs to my Com-cept series but I decided to go with a more proper title. I started this a long time ago and kept it on my drive after I was done with the main parts. It was a technical training piece. A try to create something like a battle scene. Time goes by and I focused on other projects and ideas. Then Aurora decided to go with the color theme of Orange for their next release. I got back to the piece and decided to polish it up as much as I could. Even though I’m not crazy happy with it, I do enjoy the scene and the things I wanted to learn with it… I did learn. =)

As usual the scene was created in Vue with quite some kitbashing for the ships. I did multiple renders and combined them in Photoshop. There I added the FX and overpainted/fixed stuff I was not too happy with. It’s always fun to add extra detail that makes the scene feel more alive. Last but not least some basic colour tuning in Photoshop and Lightroom. Originally I had a more poppy colour grading but decided against in favour of a more realistic approach.

6000×2739 – Vue – Photoshop – C4D – Lightroom

Part of Project Aurora: Orange

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

In Serenity

The inspiration for this one came from a piece I did in 2014. Sanctuary. A try in doing a scifi/cityscape night scene properly. I thought it would be cool to have a companion piece to it but with a daylight scenario. Something that kind of follows the same composition and setup. Not only being different in the light department but in the environment too. So this one is more based in a nature, mountain area and not in a city. So if you would put prints of them on a wall, on th left Sanctuary and on the right In Serenity, you would have a neat combination of scenes that compliment each other in many ways.

The creative process started with taking apart the 3d elements I created for the scene in 2014. I kept the curvy wall and decided to add a cool looking mural relief kind of element in the middle of it. For the material I wanted it to have a futuristic feel of a material we might not have invented yet. Something reflective and transparent but still very much hard surface looking. Maybe a futuristic kind of concrete. The other elements fell into place while working on the scene. Plants by Xfrog helped to round out the wall with some green. Thanks to Aron Kamolz for allowing me to use his falling ivy like plants on the ceiling elements. The lady was created in DAZ Studio. Background terrains done in World Machine/GeoGlyph2. With all the 3d elements in Vue and a good lighting setup, I rendered several passes of the scene and combined it in Photoshop. Then followed some overpainting, adding additional textures and fixing some issues. Lightroom, last but not least, helped me finalize the colour of the scene.

7000×3196 – Vue – Photoshop – Lightroom – World Machine – XFrog

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

XPrize: Trip

A little while ago I had the pleasure to create some work for “Seat 14c” – a scifi shortstory event, held by the XPrize folks. This particular image belongs to a short story by Justina Robinson. It’s about a young lady, unexplainable events and a futuristic airport.

5000×2813 – Vue – DAZStudio – C4D – Photoshop – Lightroom

Find the event and the stories here: Seat14c

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

Journeys Of An Unknown Huntress

Here we have something special. My first attempt working with objects (by Megascans) coming with PBR optimized high resolution textures. Very soon into the creative process I learned that, for maximum quality, I would need a new machine. So a lot of time went into optimizing the scene for the final render. Still, rendering the final took a long time to get done. So I made this project one of my benchmark projects. I pushed myself and my hardware to the limits. I cannot say how many hours went into this project but I’m fairly happy with the result.

Technically I think I haven’t used a combination of this many tools for a single project yet. I also wanted to use a perspective and camera settings that convey a nice sense of scale and depth. Bringing it all into the scene and make it sit right was a task. Along the way I picked up some bugs in Vue that got fixed rather quickly after I reported them. I have also split up the scene into foreground and background again – to keep the rendering process as efficient as possible. Because I knew that I would end up rendering some elements a couple of times to fix stuff that bugged me. Photoshop combined all the renders and added a lot of fixes, overpaints and colour adjustments.

7500×4998 – Vue – Photoshop – C4D – DAZ Studio – The Plant Factory – Lightroom – World Machine

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

Scarame

A commission from 2015. The task was to create a three sided pyramid shaped spaceship. I just had finished a book cover that also contained a pyramid (four sided though). So I created some concepts and was able to nail the requested feel rather quickly. For a better impression I also created a picture showing the pyramid in a scene.

Concept & Rough Scene Concept

Client: Scarame.com

Vue – C4D – Photoshop – Lightroom

Regards

The Invitation Pt.2

This one is actually done/finished for a long long time now. Over the past year I constantly revisited it, to fix a lot of tiny things, I wasn’t happy with and now finally reached a point where I am. It’s the second piece of my ‘Invitation’ series. I tried to venture into a different, more character based, direction and wanted to find out how good Vue works with that. Unfortunately not too good. So I had to find workarounds for my technical issues. Especially rendering the skin. Another goal was to create a scene like that as tasteful as possible. With a flair of what I love so much… Scifi.

Technically I worked with DAZ Studio to create the pose I had in mind. A lot of time went into that part, to make it work as good and natural as possible. Not sure if I succeeded entirely. But it’s close enough to what I want. Exported and imported the character into Vue, where I did set up the scene. The door kind of objects were done in C4D to frame the character and give that scene a scifi touch. Rendering went through several passes that were stitched together in Photoshop. A lot of post work, fixing, color tuning was the next step. Overall I’m fairly happy with how it turned out.

8000×5333 – Vue – Photoshop – DAZ Studio – Lightroom

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

Into The Distance

Here we have a piece I created for webinar shows I held this year for Digital Art Live (sponsored by E-On Software). Two parts in April and two parts in October. I used this project to explain my typical techniques and tried to show some experimental stuff by using JSplacement for the terrain. This gave the overall scene a neat unusual look. In the April shows we took a look into the creation of the scene in Vue and In October we checked out how to efficiently render the scene and get the most out of our post work options for best final results. A lot of time went into the preparation and I was very nervous before the shows. Overall it went all smoothly and I was able to go through all the elements I had planned to show. In the end it were around 9 hours of runtime. I can still feel how dry my mouth felt after more than 2 hours of talking. =) The audience was fun and it was a neat interaction with them and their questions. And the final image doesn’t look to bad too. Even though I admit I did add some extra detail after the shows.

I tried to keep the scene as simple as possible with its setup and look. So I wouldn’t lose myself in explaining something in the shows most attendees wouldn’t have been interested in. So you could argue it looks pretty generic. I tried to give it a more special look by using terrains created from patterns done with JSplacement. I think that helps to move the scene a little out of the ‘generic’ category. Hope you agree! =)

5000×2283 – JSplacement – Vue – Photoshop – Lightroom

Scene with No Depth Of Field
Scene Perspectives: View 1 – View 2 – View 3 – View 4 – View 5

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

Bleeding Skies

Now this one is probably a little inspired by that one map in the first Titanfall game. Pretty cool idea they had there. Giant guns targeting enemy ships in orbit. And sure, old idea! Anyway, guess I really needed to try myself on that. What I also did was to work in 16bit depth to get the most out of the colours. But you feel the load when working it in Photoshop. You definitely need some RAM for it to efficiently handle the process.

I’m a little split on how successful I am with this one. I had to leave out some of the original ideas in favour of a good composition and not make the scene appear to cluttered with stuff going on. These ideas aren’t dead though. =D I just hope the intended dynamic feels comes across nicely and sparks some imagination on what’s happening above the clouds. There’s certainly a heavy battle raging!

7684×3508 – Vue – Photoshop – Lightroom – World Machine

Part of Project Aurora: Red – https://www.projectaurora.art/

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

SITE

When I was creating my The Ghost terrain asset (quite some time ago now) I decided to play around with the materials I collected for the asset and experimented. This one is the result of such an experiment. Not too much backstory except that I always liked the natural shapes, patterns that you can see of landscapes when photographed from a very high altitude. World Machine in combination with Geoglyph 2 is able to create these natural patterns. I instantly thought it looked like an eye with all the veins going on and stuff. But also an alien planet surface maybe? I decided to add some ships and give it a more scifi feel with that. This one was fun to play around with.

6000×6000 – World Machine/Geoglyph 2 – Vue – Photoshop – Lightroom

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

Comcept 32 – Halo Over Sunset City

Welcome to SUNSET CITY! This one was a pure just for fun project. I was fiddling around in Vue when I stumbled over some atmosphere settings that created a solar eclipse kind of look. I thoroughly enjoyed that look and started to randomly add some buildings. That quickly turned into kitbashing all kinds of stuff into the scene… which lead to the results we can see in the final piece now. No specific story for this one. From what it looks like it appears to be some sort of space/port hub structure. Surely a place that could easily write its own stories – good and bad.

5000×2283 – Vue – Photoshop – Lightroom

Part of AURORA: AURORA Exhibit II

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards