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

Focus

Here we have another nifty little Apophysis/Photoshop mashup result I created for a short video workshop (find here: http://v5.tigaer-design.com/?p=1841). Yet again it was fun throwing stuff together and look at what came out in the end. Especially when I work on pics like these I really have no plan what to do. I usually create a couple of fractal plates and start playing with them. Sooner or later everything falls in place and something nice is evolving from the mess I usually start out with. Hope you enjoy as well!

Apophysis & Photoshop

Regards

It’s time for a short plug of my Science Fiction Calendar 2011. This time the included collection of art mainly focusses on SciFi pieces. Among them are personal favourites and awarded pieces like ‘Red Canyon’, ‘Phoenix Rising’, ‘Hadley’s Hope’ and ‘Gates To Elysium’. There are also some new pics in there I released this year.

It always creates a fuzzy feeling seeing these worlds on paper. Somehow it makes you want to explore these places even more deeply. Must be a good thing huh? =) So, if you don’t believe in the end of the world in 2012… BUY IT! =D

Enough talk!

For a preview of the Calendar please check here:
Sci-Fi Calendar 2012 Preview

You can buy this calendar on deviantart for:
$27.95 -> Find it here: Sci-Fi Calendar 2012

Regards

ENDEAVOURS PART ONE

As a part of the Luminarium Artgroup I had the chance to try myself on an idea that was floating through my mind for a while now. To tell a story with pictures. Now the idea itself is old and absolutely nothing new of course. But I hadn’t done something like this before. The Luminarium topic was ‘Sequential‘. Now that could be interpreted any way you want. I chose a somewhat comic like approach. What I wanted to do right from the beginning was to show how spaceships depart from a planet surface into space. I did not know how to visualize that exactly. Soon I found that, of course, some sort of cityscape thing would be the best way to depart from. Soon enough I also had a nice little story in mind. About a guy who worked in that city. Never saw the sunlight and any joy living there and just wants to get away from there. He decides to begin a new life in the off world colonies. (You get the Blade Runner ref there? Very good! ;))

Technically it’s all done using Vue and Photoshop. In Photoshop I used several filters to achieve a certain comic like flavour. Not sure if that succeeded though. The end result was very satisfying and again I learned a few things while working on the different images.

By the end of the making process I realized that the tour from the surface into space could only be the first part of the adventure. The story needs a better finish and that’s why I decided to add a ‘Part One’ to the title. Now I cannot say when I will create the second half of the series. We’ll see when it’s done I guess. For now I’m happy with the results of part one. And maybe it’s a good thing to leave the actual destination of our two ships to the imagination of the viewers. At least for a while! =)

‘Excitement’

“Do you get that feeling too? That feeling of excitement when you know the next day will be great because you’ll be off into the holidays with the family or something? Now this is not much different. To finally leave this place, start over somewhere else and see your loved ones again. This is the first step of my endeavour and I’m so excited!”

‘Here We Go Again’

“There is surely one thing I will definitely not miss. Working in this heavy industrial environment was a pain. All day long in the shadows of these superstructure towers. Knowing there’s a warm sun… but never seeing it. I hope the colonies will offer a more peaceful working environment. It’ll be hard there too. No doubt. But it will be better! Not just because I won’t feel alone anymore.”

‘Wave Goodbye’

“That’s the dream. At least when you’re looking for it here. Living in the higher levels of these skytowers. I never was so high up but I saw pictures of the most amazing sunsets you can imagine. My dreams lie beyond these towers and this planet. Can’t wait to get there. Can’t wait to see my own sunsets.”

‘Leaving The Fields Of Steel’

“Looking down into this mess of a city it looks almost peaceful. A symbol of how far mankind came the last 500 years. All the magic we are able to do now and take for granted. All these amazing achievements. But we’re sill looking for the things we’ve always been looking for. Peace, family, hope, new goals and a better life.”

‘All These Worlds Are Yours’

“I travelled into space maybe three or four times and the sight is still the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. It must be the saddest thing to work up here. Seeing this grand view but not being able to appreciate it anymore. That’ll never happen to me!”

‘Begin A New Life’

“Oh, I almost forgot that funny prickling feeling when a ship enters the space dock and shifts gravity fields. That must be how true excitement really feels! Can’t wait to get through transition and board the ship to the colonies. I hope so much this endeavour will lead me somewhere good. For me it is quite a risk. I’m sure it will! Someone is waiting there for me.”

Regards

I’m proud to say that i’m, unexpectedly, one of the winners of the contest. I always was a big fan of the look and design of EvE Online. For years i wanted to try it out and last year i did it. I did not regret it. Even if i learned that it can eat your life away. That’s why i’m currently taking a break from it. So much to see there… so much to do and sooooo much to learn there. It’s a lot of fun. Now when i created my ship design i haven’t played a lot of the game. Only a few tiny glimpses of how big it really is. So i did not have a real feel for the different races and designs yet. Nonetheless i wanted to try myself on it. And so i did. I must admit though that i did not expect AT ALL to win anything… seeing all these great submissions that were posted to the contest. When the confirmation mail came in i almost deleted it, thinking it was spam. Luckily i took a closer look.

With my entry (above) the following designs managed to win:

Alexey M (Winner of the Grand Prize) – Mentor Battlecruiser

Eric A – Oblivion Battlecruiser

Shawn N – Amarr Command Ship Battlecruiser

Eric A – Serval Battlecruiser

Beside my congratulations to the other winning designers i want to mention the 40 designs that made it into the final round of voting. I urge you to check them out if you’re a Scifi fan. All of them look really really cool! Find them HERE.

Technically i created the basic ship design and shape with help of ZBrush. Still a lot to learn there. In Photoshop i added texture and details to the hull. When it comes to EvE specific design then i would say it’s a Caldari or Gallente ship. The background of the pic is one of my Vue scenes. I haven’t released that pic yet. It’s collecting dust here somewhere on my HD.

Regards

Valis Licentia

This picture is the perfect example of the famous ‘creative spark’. I never had the intention or plan to do a picture like this one. I never had a concept to this one in mind. I just sat down and worked it out. Everything fell to its place by accident when i was playing with the Vue 9 pre release version. Out of nowhere a creative flow started to happen.

It basically started with trying and playing with Vue again. Creating a nice mountain terrain and adding trees. Playing with atmosphere and lighting. This is actually how a lot of my personal projects come together and start out. Ultimately i had this nice mountain range, atmosphere and forest in front of me and thought… “yes… that’s it… go for it”. At this point no plans for a scifi setting. I also wanted a river in the scene. Some time went into the placing and adding and getting it right of the river part. Then the landscape part was done and i did a large multipass render of it. It took 18hrs to finish. That was early november i think. I really liked the result. The multipass also allowed me to extend the planning for the pic.

I thought around a while and found that some sort of scifi haven/port for ships would be a cool thing. So i added the towers. The original idea was to add one much closer to the camera on the left. But that did not work out well and completely ruined the composition for me. So i decided to move it farther back. That way the atosphere had much more space to unfold its nice detail and lighting. And the eye has a much more pleasant view on the overall scene. I decided to add more towers in the back to get some more depth into the scene. Not sure if that works 100%.

The Photoshop work, or ‘post work’, included refining of the atmosphere and bringing out details that i wanted to pop a bit more. Since a lot of elements, like the towers, were added in the process i had to do some extra integration work to make it all sit right in the image. I also added some atmospheric beams to bring out the atmosphere. I think that works nicely.

Not knowing what i was going to end up with was a nice thing. Even today i made last changes to the pic. Now every pic should have some sort of message huh? I guess what the pic is trying to say is that even highly developed races should be able to merge their structures into a foreign environment without disturbing it. Something ‘we’ are not able to do. The towers in the pic certainly have a very industrial look to them. Nonetheless they’re able to keep the environment untouched.

Photoshop – Vue – 5000px wide

Plates and Progress & Print Details

Regards

Hadley’s Hope

What if kinda sorta maybe Hadley’s Hope in ‘Aliens’ didn’t explode and developed its colony further? But yeah you could say I fell in love with the city I created in ‘Phoenix Rising‘. Since I have built me quite a nice plate in Vue, I had to take another visit. And it could become more in the future. I’m sure you don’t mind as long as some stunning vistas like this one are the result of these excursions. Again I’m wondering why I’m into such megacities. I’m very interested in technology, where it took us in the past and where it may take us in the future. Maybe that’s a reason.

When I started this one I didn’t have a real plan. I was just playing with atmospheres and clouds in Vue and found a nice point of view on the city part we see farther in the back of my ‘Phoenix Rising‘ picture. Started to add more details to that area and moved objects around to find a good composition. Lots of smaller testrenders happening in that stage. When I had arranged everything to a point of satisfaction I started play with the lighting. I really wanted to make it look somewhat photoreal without to lose the usual tension and contrast that I usually get into my pics. I eventually became undecided between a more natural lighted sunset with the light source behind the camera and a real devilish/hellish red backlit situation with the sun shining directly into the cam.

I stuck to the backlit setup because of the tension it created in the scene. Nonetheless I had a problem with visible detail. Since it all was pretty much in shadow. But I wanted lots of details visible! What I did was rendering both lighting situations i had in mind. The one with the sun behind the camera captured all the little details I wanted visible. I took that render pass and layered it above the backlit version and started work both together. That’s a technique I use whenever I want more detail in certain shadowy areas. Of course you can also use the multipass possibilities of Vue to fix those. It all depends on what you want to achieve.

In the end I managed to get a pretty decent result together that can walk hand in hand with my ‘Phoenix Rising’ project. It shows another side of that megacity. A bit darker and dense… almost like you could swim through the atmosphere. Another view I would die for to see for real.

Vue – Photoshop – Wacom – 4000px wide

Vue Approaches & Print Details

Two versions of wallpapers in the pack: 1920×1200/1080p – 1680×1050 – 1280×1024 – 1280×800/720p

Regards

It’s time to make downloading of wallpapers even more comfortable than it already was! The future! New alternatives! New hopes! New dreams! Alright… enough advertising phrases for now. Windows 7 has that one unique feature that allows you do create your own Wallpaper Packs! People can download and doubleclick these and *kaboom* Windows automatically applies the pack and its settings! I really dig that. That’s why i decided to create some packs for selected artworks in my gallery from time to time. All at once would be boring right? ;) However. In these packs i try to cover all possible standard resolutions. So it’s surely worth a look. I thought that Fractal and Abstract pictures, which work magnificient as wallpapers, are the perfect start for this collection. For now you can find Themepacks for the following pieces:

Windows 7 ‘HRT‘ Theme Pack

Windows 7 ‘Synchrotone‘ Theme Pack

Windows 7 ‘Solitude In Chaos‘ Theme Pack

Windows 7 ‘Where Is My Mind‘ Theme Pack

Windows 7 ‘Hades – Valiant‘ Theme Pack

All pictures in this Theme Pack are copyrighted by tigaer-design.com and may not used or reproduced without permission. Thank you very much.

I hope you like it. Stay Tuned for more! Thank you.

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

Time flies by! And it seems i say that every year. However… the time is right and i took myself some time to create a nifty calendar for YOUR 2010! Man. 2010 sounds like a Sci-fi movie doesn’t it? Very weird. Now this year the calendar contains completely new works from my 2009 collection. No recycling of older artworks. Even though i’m thinking some of you would have liked it to see some older works in it too. :) In retrospective i’m proud of my work this year. It’s some solid work and the presentation within the calendar looks cool too i think. So if you want to discover a new world every month or you want someone to discover these worlds with you… go ahead and check out the calendar. :) I’m sure it’s something for everyone! Discover…!

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