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

CITY VIEW

This is the result of a workshop i wrote for the german ‘DigitalPHOTO Photoshop’ magazine, issue 02/10. The goal was to create a Digital Matte Painting and to explain the various steps that lead to the final product. For the picture i had a really nice plate from a good friend, Kai Bellmann, who recently visited Vietnam. He captured that nice street view and i really wanted to do something with it. Luckily the magazine came knocking on my door and i had the perfect opportunity to create something. Everything done with Photoshop. No Vue this time. I dig the result and it was something different from the things i usually do. I should do more into that direction.

For all german visitors… the magazine is now available and also includes a character painting workshop from my buddy Gary Tonge. A side by side workshop with Gary… never thought that could happen. :)

Plate: here

Hope you like it as much as i do!

3500px high – photoshop – intuos3

Regards

2510

How could a city look like in 500 years from now?

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.

In the the past months i did a few concepts for a shortmovie script of a colleague. He wants to use these pics to promote his idea. The script is indeed very good and offers quite some eyecatchers. I got contacted to visualize some of the environments. Technically i can say that i did me a base Vue render i manipulated in Photoshop to get me the right results. Pretty much the technique i’m using on almost every project these days. It was a nice break from the sci-fi’ish things i had created simultaneously for other projects. Now i hope i was able to visually capture some of the ideas from the script. Ultimately i think they work pretty good. Feel free to click on the pics for a larger version.

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

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 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

PIXELARTS is a Digital Art Magazine that focusses on individual artists as well as Production and Studios. It’s rich of pictures and inspiring artwork for everyone who is interested in the matter. Most importantly… it’s free! I had the honour to be featured in this latest issue 13. I just checked out this months issue and again it holds some very inspiring work on its pages. Check it out online or download the full (heavy) version!

Regards

GATES TO ELYSIUM

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.

Really hope you like what you see.

Intuos3 – Photoshop cs4 – Vue7 – 7hrs Preparation & Concept Phase – 40hrs Rendertime – 20hrs Postwork

Wallpaper Pack contains: 1920×1200 Concept Wallpaper – 1680×1050 & 1280×1024 GTE Wallpaper – Print Details

Print Detail
Progress Viz
Wireframe Bows
Wireframe Ring

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety – Behance

Regards