Digital Art, Paintings, Fractal and 3d work created by Christian Tigaer Hecker. News about the artist and Interviews with Artists like Dylan Cole, Gary Tonge and Syd Mead.
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!
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.
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!
This is my benchmark painting for 2009. Much like my pervious big ones like ‘Artificial‘ or ‘Epica‘ this painting marks something special for me personally and in a technical way. I also used it to check out how much my, currently, new machine can take. I used Vue to render the basic 3d plate. I also rendered each part on a standalone pass. So the ground complex was done within a single Vue file, as well as the ring part. The small ships and the clouds were also rendered with single takes. That gives you the most freedom in the postwork. The hero render with the ground stuctures, landscape took about 28hrs to finish. A first try to render it failed after 8hrs with a corrupt Vue file when I tried to resume the render later. That was fun. All the other elements got rendered in a much shorter time. I also used quite some quality settings for the hero render.
I used Dystopia City Blocks to create the structures and techy elements. Before I could use them I had to split the original files apart with c4d to pick me the most interesting models off the pack. Required quite some time. In Vue then I used the models to create the structures. It’s much like the modellers who worked on the first starwars movies who did use old battleship modelkits to create their spaceships. I’m doing the same with these 3d models of the buildings. Take something that’s already there to create something new. Did that with my ‘Epica’ painting too but I was not as deep into 3d as I am now. Not saying that I’m a 3d specialist… by – no – means! =)
Inspiration could be, once again, Mass Effect. I think the lighting, colors and style goes the same direction the game does. It’s also my wish to have a chance to see such things with my own eyes. That would be quite a sight I guess. Of course the usual suspects like the Coruscant cityplanet from starwars and other sci-fi movies and books.
Vue is your friend! When you’re not exactly the most talented painter then Vue really helps you to create a base for your idea. The weird rock formations/mountains were quickly modelled in C4d and imported to Vue. Ecosystems added a plantlife quickly and kaboom… it’s rendered. Then the fun can happen in Photoshop. This painting is, again, some sort of training piece. Basically i wanted to create a strangely familiar, yet exotic, looking place. It’s also a different colorpalette. Surely a nice addition to my portfolio. When you check the plate (link beneath the description) you will notice how much work was done in Photoshop. Basically i used digital painting to extend different elements and got me some good photo textures to add the level of detail i wanted. The ships were added late in the process and are completely painting. Now i would love to explore this planet with one of those ships!
And another starwars inspired try in cityscape environment design. No big story for this one. Just fiddled around with vue and photoshop – just for fun. That’s why the basic look of it is kinda dirty and gritty… concept arty. I kinda like the result that offers a nice depth to the eye. Technically i was messing around with texures and brushes in photoshop. The difference in this painting basically is the perspective that hopefully makes the viewer feel as if we’re flying into the city. So… i hope you enjoy the trip. :)
Here we have the first painting i did on my new machine. I had the actual cave background plate render on my disk for a while now and used this project to see what the new machine can do. I’m pretty happy with the results i got from this project. Computer speed wise as well as painting result wise. I really used Vue a lot here to render out different elements for the background and foreground. The crystals, ships and trees were implemented with help of multipass rendering. Due to the speed of my new machine i finished the painting in a very good time.
This is a painting that, after lots of storyless pieces, has a story again. Some of you might know that U2 song ‘Van Diemen’s Land’. One of the most beautiful songs ever btw. In fact i listened to it when i was looking for a painting title. I always liked that name ‘Van Diemen’ and used it here. Now lets say this base we see here is some sort of hidden pirate base. Hidden within some sort of planetoid/super asteroid.
The Story
A rock large enough to develop some sort of atmosphere where plants can grow. But only on the inside caves of the asteroid. On the surface you’ll find plain death. Downcrashing asteroids. Deadly subeams. Extreme temperatures. Due to a special magnetic field the base cannot be spotted. You can only get there with the right coordinates! The base was once founded by a space pirate legend named (you guess it) Van Diemen. After one of his biggest coups he had to flee before a huge fleet that tried to hunt him down. His last chance was to hide in an asteroid field! He and his men made the brave decision to hide within an immense large weird splitted/cracked open rock, carefully maneuvering his massive ship, while the fleet searched everything for him. Soon he started to wonder why they did not pick up the energy signature of his ship and found out about the specialty of this place. He started to make plans… to build a hideout! That was 200 years ago. Now this place became a massive outpost for all sorts civilizations. The place now is named after its founder but it’s no more a place for criminals and other scum of the universe. It’s still very tricky to find this base and even with automated landing procedures there happen accidents every now and then. So when you plan your trip there… better pay some extra for a good ship and an even better captain!
CDS12032009 – Creation Process – High Quality – Here we go with a cityscape kind of thing. We use perspective lines that help us to keep everythng straight and somewhat realistic looking. At least in perspective. The painting, of course, is very loose. I also tried to get in some colors. I kinda like the result of this one! Hope you too. =)
Depending on how the juices flow it’s 30/60mins time in these designs.
This one was in the works for quite some time now. I’m not entirely happy with the results but i did my best to make it look somewhat interesting. Again it’s a try in digital matte painting combining rendered elements with photo. A friend of mine always said that i need something snowy for my portfolio and so i did it. I did not have any specific concept in mind for this one except the fact that i wanted crystals in there. The photos i used are none of the ones i shot while visiting a friend in austria. Those will come handy in later projects. The crystals were modeled in C4d and imported into Vue. There i created an eco system and painted them onto the landscape. Worked pretty good! Only the integration process in Photoshop was quite difficult. Some pieces are fun to work on and others can become quite heavy work. This one was work. Nonetheless i hope the stormy mountain atmosphere works and you’ll get some goosebumps from the cold the image shows!
CDS24022009 – Creation Process – High Quality – Like the previous shorts this one was also a test to find the right settings for screen recording. Here we have me trying so do some abstract landscape stuff. It was fun and i should do more stuff like this. This time i also changed the Photoshop setup so you people can see a bit what’s happening in the palettes.
Depending on how the juices flow it’s 30/60mins time in these designs.
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