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

Für die 60. ausgabe des englischen magazins habe ich einen workshop zu ‘Artificial’ schreiben dürfen. Dieser artikel ist nun auch in der deutschen ausgabe des Advanced Photoshop Magazine erhältlich. Darin wird erklärt wie man mit Terragen eine gute vorlage zu weiterführenden arbeiten in Photoshop erstellen kann. Wie man eine richtig coole szene erstellen kann. Auf der disc zum heft kann man zudem nachsehen wie die Photoshop datei aufgebaut ist. Ein vorteil an diesem projekt war das man es ohne grafiktablett möglich ist. Das bild ist von 2005 und damals habe selbst ich noch ohne tablet gearbeitet. Also auch für einsteiger interessant. Soviel mal hierzu… :)

Schaut mal rein. Es ist durchaus einen blick wert!

Regards

SHORES OF CLOUDS

I just noticed that it’s far too long since i posted my last picture! It’s been a bit busy here recently. However! The last weeks i’m playing around with Vue 8. And finally i found the time to finish up a pic. There’s no big background story here. I was just testing around. The new clouds in Vue 8 really are a bit better than in Vue 7. It still takes ages to render them… but they look good. In this picture we probably have 75% Vue and 25% Photoshop. I used Photoshop to tweak colours and atmosphere. As well as lighting and fixing some weird render results. Especially edges and such things. Smoothing them out. I also painted a few highlights in and added some subtle textures.

Render Info:

My machine is a i7 920 and 12gb ram. For a 3000px wide render it took 4hrs and 30mins to finish. So yeah. Detailed clouds still are time consuming. And i doubt that will change. The terrain was a procedural. Which needed some time too.

Hope you like it as much as i do!

3000px wide – photoshop – vue – intuos3

Regards

And again it’s been a while with concept art gallery additions. This time i added 7 new pics. Ships, stations, scenes and speeders. I’m also thinking about redoing this gallery. It looks a bit clunky right now. On the other hand i don’t have too much time recently. We’ll see! :) For now i hope you can find some more inspiration in that gallery.

Regards

RED DAWN

Most of the time i sorta like my work. I’m never 100% happy. And basically, as an artist, you should never be 100% happy with what you do. Just to stay motivated and inspired. Now with this piece i’m almost 90% happy. And that’s a lot. I’m a sucker for backlit, sunset scenes so here we have another one. I would also say that this is pretty much a matte painting quality again. Haven’t tried myself in that for a while. Now the plate i rendered myself with Vue really kicked a**, and i wanted to make it look somewhat photo real. The rendertime needed for the plate was something around 26hrs. I also got some nice photo reference material from a good friend and used some in my painting. Roger…! I love you. :)

Hope you like it as much as i do!

5000px wide – photoshop – vue – intuos3

Plate can be found here.

Print detail can be found here (Large file).

Camera Mapping Animation here.

Regards

Comcept 13

Now this one is a Vue render i had on my HD for a while now. Pretty much like my previous Comcept painting. A few days ago i took me a few hours to mess around with it and unleashed a tour of filters on it. As well as textures and adjustment layers and stuff stuff stuff. Quick and dirty. Result ends in a, from my point of view, nice Blade Runner’ish setup.

Basically what i wanted to portrait was a kind of docking station within a huge futuristic city. Now the ships we see have a crew of probably 200-300 people. So the dimensions here are pretty huge. Just the way i like it. All i wanted was to transfer an idea and i hope i do here. Hope you like the vision and style.

6hrs – Photoshop – Vue – Intuos 3

Regards

Comcept 12

Actually this is a picture i had on my HD for quite a while now. At least when it comes to the clouds. Originally it was a plain Vue 7 test render. I really liked how it turned out and wanted to do something with it. Unfortunately i never found the right time for it. So until now it had to wait a binary eternity on my HD. I never wanted to do something complex with it. So i took me a day for it and painted some cool ship that is having a trip there. Man it would be awesome flying that ship through these huge formations of clouds.

Technically it’s Vue 7 for the clouds and sky. I was playing around with filters in Photoshop and, of course, the ship was created with help of my wacom and some custom brushes. All in all 7hrs for the rendering on my Laptop machine and 2hrs to finish the pic up in Photoshop.

Photoshop – Vue – Intuos 3

Since the pic really works as a wallpaper i thought i’d create a nifty pack with it. So people… i hope you have fun with it! This pack contains the following sizes:

800×600 – 1024×768 – 1280×1024 – 1280×720 – 1680×1050 – 1920×1080 – 1920×1200

Regards

WISH YOU WERE HERE

Now it’s time to add a big one again. My recent Comcept 11 was a smaller piece and now i’m happy to add another big one to my gallery. I’m on a landscape trip these days. I guess i need a break from the Sci-Fi theme. Now on this project i learned a lot about Vue again. As always. This time i worked with own textures and checked out how terrains handle it, how i can effectively use this technique for my future projects. While, of course, there is Photoshop work in here… it definitely is less than usual. I had to overpaint a few areas that did not come out like expected. I also reworked the colors and atmosphere a bit… as well as changing the clouds. So in the end it’s 50/50 between pure Vue and postwork with Photoshop. While i was indeed targeting a more photorealistic look i couldn’t resist making the atmosphere a bit more vivid than it would actually be in a photo. Ultimetaly it adds a new combination of colors to my overall gallery and therefor also adds more flexibility.

No specific story behind that picture except the fact that i wanted to make it look earthly… yet… other worldy in its overall appearence. Hope i succeded! Hope you like it!

Photoshop – Vue – Intuos 3 – 4500px wide – 24hrs

Regards

COMCEPT 11

The first Comcept painting for this year i think. Yes, the series is not dead. It’s also the first bigger painting since my CGChoice Award win. Beside other projects i’m currently wrapping up it is, from time to time, fun to work on more loose paintings. Just smashing together some textures and see what comes out of it. Waiting for the lucky accident that makes you go ‘click’… and start to refine things a bit. That’s what i did here. No specific target in mind. Just had a nice Vue forest render and played around with it. Additionally i was playing around with how to effectively add a lens flare to suggest a more photo like look. Hope you like it!

Photoshop – Vue – Intuos 3 – 3000px wide – 8hrs

Regards

And again it’s been a while with concept art gallery additions. I took me some time to add a few new things to it. Transporters, fighters and a scene sketch. I should do more in that direction but time is a precious thing. Hope you get some inspiration there! Have fun.

Regards

This is a Vue testrender i did a few days ago. I dug myself a bit deeper into Vue’s possibilities over the last few days and learned a lot of nice new things. Most importantly that the values in Vue’s options often are not limited to the values the according sliders give/allow you. Especially for fog or aerial perspective… you can use much much higher values than 10 or 100%. I did not notice that to be honest. Now with the right values you can really create something pretty! ‘Almost’ photorealistic… with the right cpu power and enough ram. Check out the pic by clicking on it and you will get a larger version. It’s 80% Vue and 20% Photoshop in there. I couldn’t resist pimping that pic up a bit. =) It’s been a bit quiet with digital art here… but i’m back on track!

Regards