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.
I finished this quite a while ago and finally i got it onto my page. All the time i was thinking about what else i could add to make it even more interesting. Stuff like that can be a trap. Instead of realizing that the pic is pretty much done you keep thinking and thinking. In the end this is a rare pic to find in my gallery. I can’t remember many night scenes i did so far. It’s not that it’s difficult to do them. Somehow i’m more the evening or morning type with my paintings. This picture here has quite some nice details and atmosphere. Could be a scene straight out of Total Recall or Blade Runner.
Actually this is no new picture. It took me a while to find the right title for it because i wanted it to be part of my ‘Heimat’ series. I also invested a bit more time into it to get the best off of it. Therefore this turned out to be more a manipulation or digitally darkroomed instead of a standalone photo. However – i think i got some beautiful color harmonies into it. I don’t even know anymore how exactly i made the photos for this one. I only know that it’s several shots combined and blended together. I dig it… hope you too!
That said… i hope you guys enjoy the Wallpaper Pack. 1680×1050 & 1920×1200 and more versions of the scene. Have fun with it!
Phoenix Rising is without doubt the largest personal project i ever did so far. The project involved in depth work with Vue 8, Photoshop, After Effects and minor sound editing. The techniques i used were basically digital matte painting oriented and involved camera mapping, editing, motion tracking and of course 2d and 3d work.
In the beginning i was thinking about how i could top the success and personal achievements i got out of ‘Gates To Elysium’. That was late May 2009. That picture was able to gain itself a CGChoice Award on CGTalk and that means a lot to me especially motivation wise. But the question still was how i could top that. And by that i don’t mean prizes or awards. Would i be able to create a similar good or even better piece of work? Something that would satisfy me on all levels…?
November 2009 i started to play with an idea without actually thinking about making this my benchmark for 2010. I fiddled around with Vue since i knew it would play a significant part in the upcoming project. I tossed around some objects and soon packed the scene full to the brim with stuff. Since i still am not the brightest light in 3d modeling i worked much like in the last years project and used parts of the DAZ 3D Cityblocks to arrange me the scene. Again i took lots of the models apart and reorganized them to make the buildings look the way i wanted. Knowing that quite some Photoshop work would be laid on top of it all. Vue already started to act up because of the load. So i decided to leave that behind and concentrated on the atmosphere aspect of the scene. I already had a really beautiful cloud setup and lighting. I knew i had to do something with it. Soon after that i felt a deep pain in my brain when i saw the needed render times for that atmosphere. I started a test render for those clouds and the atmosphere and it took ages. I did the render just to see how it would look in the end. I were like 60-70hrs when it was done. And the clouds still looked nice on 5000px wide.
February 2010 i picked up the project and really started to work on it. Building up the city elements and experimenting with the tons of ideas i got when i worked on it. Finding the right position for the camera wasn’t an easy task here. I already was playing with the idea of making a camera mapping animation out of the project. Friends are calling me ‘sick’ and ‘lunatic’ now. But that’s the price you pay. If i would have known how much work i had to invest… i guess i would have stopped right away. But i didn’t know and when i was already working on it… i wanted it to be done right.
Early March was the time i started to render the final parts for the Photoshop work. Starting with the atmosphere and the background city. The atmosphere and background elements were rendered on a slightly higher quality than the foreground elements since the lighting and clouds needed to look good. Without too much noise and everything. It was a painstakingly 90hrs render. It took me 5 days to render it. Thank god for the resume ability of Vue. But it was worth the wait! When it was done i had really good multipass material to work with. All the other foreground elements were rendered in roughly 30hrs. Light and atmosphere did not require super high settings so i turned those down a but. All of these renders were done with multipass options. The ultimate freedom for the Photoshop work.
With the main renders done i started to stitch everything together in Photoshop. That was the easiest part. I already had several hours into the Photoshop work when i accidentally overwrote the Photoshop file with all the layers. §”4%&=? awesome! In the end i would say that it was good. I had the chance to redo some of the work steps and saw that i also had an alternative way to do certain operations. That lead to a better picture quality in certain areas of the sky. Nonetheless i wasn’t happy when i found out that my PSD was ruined. That was the first time something like that ever happened to me. Normally I’m very careful with my PSD files.
With the Photoshop work going on i discovered possibilities in the picture that i had to take. So i dug out Vue again to add even more details. Again multipass was helpful to easily place the new elements in the picture. The ultimate freedom! The Photoshop work was a lot of fun and seeing worlds building up in front of your eyes is always very satisfying. I was thinking about the fact that i really would love to see this in moving pictures.
I also thought that i must be crazy. All the ideas i had in mind for an animation. All the time i would need to realize these ideas! Yes, crazy! However! Late march i started to play with Vue and made first experiments with a possible camera mapping animation for the picture. The picture was pretty much done, except for some stylistic things and very small details.
Now camera mapping is not a thing i would say I’m an expert in. I’m not exactly firm in 3d modeling and kept the ingredients from the original Vue scene pretty much untouched in Photoshop. That means i did not add extra elements to the buildings etc – i only added things within the actual building shapes. Always keeping in mind that i ‘could’ be doing an animation of this. To have worked that way really helped me with the camera mapping. Nonetheless i had to take the painting apart again. Foreground, background, middle pieces etc etc etc – so that you would be able to see what actually is behind the big towers. All these textures demanded extra attention and a lot of extra work. That done i could concentrate on the ships!
In April then i was in the middle of the animation work. Man how much time went into the rendering of all the different passes. Not to mention the test renders! Not to mention the disk space needed! I rendered everything in uncompressed AVI format. 5.6gb for 40 seconds of film in 1920×1038. And i had to split the renders in the middle because when i rendered it in on task it produced a weird error and played the movie not like it was supposed to. So a lot of stitching of movie files going on. Not to mention that After Effects can be a true pain to work with. Tons of crashes! But somehow i got through.
Early May i was pretty much done with the animation itself and saw how i could get it polished perfectly in After Effects. I wanted to add a bit of dirt to the lens and found some helpful tutorials on YouTube. The internet generally is amazing for tutorials… even for video stuff.
With the animation done i got back to the painting and refined a few more things on it. That makes it look a tiny bit different than the animation. Nonetheless i’m very happy with both results and never thought i would be able to pull all that off.
While ‘Phoenix Rising’ is the actual project name i found it interesting to give the city a name too. ‘Hadley’s Hope’ is of course the name of the camp on planet LV426 in James Cameron’s ‘Aliens’. I liked the idea of taking that camp and its story out of the ‘Aliens’ context and wondered how that colony would/could look after 1000 years.
Oh a lot of text and it could be so much more! Hope you enjoy the picture, the animation and the whole world you can discover! It was quite a journey to explore and create it! Ultimately it does satisfy m on all level. It’s again a personal achievement i never thought i would be able to pull off. That’s a good thing.
Special Thanks: http://www.greendjohn.net for his awesome music! His piece ‘Windcatcher’ was perfect for my project and conveys exactly the atmosphere i wanted.
Hope you guys enjoy this shorty. For me this is a special animation since so much time went into it. It was the most complex endeavour i ever did and it was worth it!
5000px wide – Photoshop – Vue – After Effects – Infinite Number of Hours
Yet another comcept piece for the series. Like comcept 15 it’s a test with Vue and some new plant models. Again i tried to bring in variety and chaos without to lose the eye for a somewhat good composition. All this just for fun. I like this more than the pevious comcept piece. I think the lighting works better here and the overall look feels a bit magic. Maybe my imagination plays tricks on me here. I used the multipass images Vue created for this one to get more detail off the shadowy areas. That worked very nice and created more volume on the textures… if that makes any sense. =D However… i like this one.
That said… i hope you guys enjoy the Wallpaper Pack. 1680×1050 & 1920×1200 version of the scene. Have fun with it!
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:
This one resulted from a commission that did not work out as expected. I didn’t want to scrap the picture i did and wanted to use it for a personal project. I decided to create a panorama from it. Which wasn’t an easy task since the original format was portrait, intended for a book.
Technically i took the vue base file and heavily extended it to the left. The Vue file had a few hundred mb in the end. I also did tons of testrenders for it. Even full size and full quality. So there are surely 40hrs work in the setup of the scene alone. 8hrs actual work and the rest render time. 8000px wide can take a while to finish.
Then, of course, i took it into Photoshop. It was never an intention to work photorealistic. So what i did was to get me textures and slam them across the picture. That’s the fun part. the work part was it then to manipulate and adjust these textures to make them fit. Vue’s multipass rendering also allowed me to add new elements to the pic. Even if i already was completely in the Photoshopping stage. Quite some elements on the left side of the pic got added rather late in the making process. Again a lot of work that i had to do because i wasn’t entirely happy with certain parts. And there goes the time.
8700px wide – Photoshop – Vue – intuos3
That said… i hope you guys enjoy the Wallpaper Pack. 5 different versions of the scene in 1680×1050. Have fun with it!
WALLPAPER PACK
Windows 7 ‘2510’ Theme Pack -> Here – Just download and doubleclick to install – if you have any additional questions… just let me know! It’s the first time i try this.
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 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.
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. :)
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.
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:
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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:
