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

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

CC35 – The Chase 4

This one is the result of playing around with “The Stingray” – a GAEA generated terrain asset I made available on Artstation & Gumroad. I found this really cool angle that displayed the rich terrain detail so well. The next logical step (at least for me) – add some ships! At first I just had them pretty sterile in the scene. Flying over the landscape. Then I decided to add a little more action and make it a chase scene. Tried a couple new things and had my fun with it. The ships were done fairly quickly by kitbashing around a little bit. I really enjoy how they turned out.

6000×2739 – Vue – Photoshop – Lightroom – Gaea

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

It Must Be Stars

“We just entered the outside perimeter of the city. I heard amazing things but it’s not really visible yet. Just a glimmer on the horizon. We’ve set course and got official permission to enter the inner perimeter. Slowly one big, blurry light became two, then three, four and soon thousands. “It must be stars” I thought, as we moved in closer and the city grew in front of my eyes, with all its life and lights.”

This one originally was a commission request but it ended up nowhere since I knew it would be quite a task if I wanted to maintain my usual quality – and my level of detail and quality was one of the main reasons the client contacted me. In the end there wasn’t enough budget. So I decided not to throw my initial concept work away and gave it a go as a personal piece. I think it kind of ended up like something the client would have been quite happy with. Although I did go a slightly different route when the commission fell apart.

For the look I wanted something ‘ancient/old scifi’ looking. A palace and a city that look oldish and majestic but still have some kind of base in technology. Much like Naboo in Phantom Menace I guess. Of course I drew some inspiration from the briefing material I got from the client. Although their idea was underwater and the scene I created isn’t. Even though the color scheme might suggest it is. It’s more a place or location you would find in the Marvel universe I guess. That’s at least how I approached it.

I certainly would love to explore that city and get blown away by the sheer scale of the palace above the city.

7000×3196 – Vue – C4D – Photoshop – Lightroom – World Machine – Geoglyph

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

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