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

The Invitation Pt.1

The first one for 2017 is an experiment from early last year and something quite different from my usual stuff. Normally I focus on the environments and add characters to make these environments feel alive. So they are usually just an addon. With this one I wanted to focus on a character instead of the environment. Without making the environment too boring though. I must also admit that I did not sculpt the lady by hand. I used DAZStudio for it. So I definitely admire people who can do that stuff from scratch. However, I did not use a DAZ pose or character preset! There went a lot of work into posing and the proportions of that lady. Tons of testrenders for lighting setup and material checking. A lot of detail work that went into this lady. I wanted this to by sexy, treating the pic like a fine art nude photo shoot of sorts. Everything as tasteful as possible, without it to appear too ‘revealing’. Hope I got that part right.

Technically the figure and its pose was done in DAZ Studio and then exported for use in Vue. There I did some heavy material tweaking and tried to get the light right. The render happened in 9000×6000 and even if it is a quite simple scene, there went some extra time into the Photoshop process. Mainly to fix things and to overpaint small areas. I also rendered multiple passes of the scene and even worked with an HDR pass. The latter helped to get the skin tones right. In the last stage of creating this one, Lightroom helped me to get the colour I had in mind right.

This pic is the first one in a three part series. And, probably the best one. But that is a definite taste thing. :D

9000×6000 – Vue – DAZ Studio – Photoshop – Lightroom

Print Detail

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – Drawcrowd – CGSociety

Regards

Gillian’s Place

I started this one a while ago, after I finished ready “Stranger In A Strange Land” by Robert Heinlein. Early in the story we are in an apartment where the floor is covered with a carpet of grass. I already had the idea before I read this book but the book helped me to flesh out the idea. So the inspiration for this scene came, in parts, from the book. There we also have this lady character Gillian who loved the grass carpet in the apartment of a friend and I wanted to give her her own apartment. =)

I used this project to dig a little deeper into 3d modeling and how I can use it for my ideas. I also tried myself on basic cloth simulation for the sheets. So ultimately there went quite some time into this scene because a lot of it went into experimenting. For the sculpture I also experimented with subsurface scattering to give it a quasi translucent look that captures the light. The modeling part happened in C4D and the scene setup in Vue. Photoshop brought it all together and I refined and fixed a lot of things I wasn’t too happy with in the renders.

6000×3000 – C4D – Vue – The Plant Factory – Photoshop – Lightroom

Had my fun with this one and hope you enjoy the view. :)

Wireframe 1
Plate 1
Plate 2
Plate 3
Print Detail

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

Fly Me To The Moon

This one was a commission done quite some time ago. It’s done for a young lady who wanted a special gift for her boyfriend’s birthday. She told me that he’s a very big Scifi fan and wanted something personal and special. The sweetest thing ever and the girlfriend we all dream of, don’t you agree? I ultimately was very happy to help her out and together we managed to create something everyone was very happy with. She very early on made clear that the pic should show a moon scene with a base and Earth in the back. I took it a step further and started to build a city.

‘Collins City’ is a mixture of DAZ3d models and modified 3d models. Everything arranged and setup with Vue. The challenge was to create a scene without using atmospherical effects. The moon has a very specific lighting going on and I wanted to recreate that as good as possible. The foreground required some extra time to get the microcomposition right. The lighting was a little tricky too. After rendering the elements I used Photoshop to fix things and overpaint a couple of elements. Also the mood and the lighting received some touch ups.

So in the end we have a neat scene where even I managed to learn things from. And a young couple that enjoys the result very much and has something I created as a symbol of their love. That’s pretty amazing.

6000×3000 – Vue – Photoshop – DAZ3d

Print Detail
Creative Process
Earth Photo Credit

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

Comcept 21 – Battlegroup Selcior

This one was a plain just for fun thing, started quite a while ago. When playing around, I started to like it and things fell into place for the final result you can see there now. It was a quickie and nothing overly complicated. Even though I (as usual) got carried away a little. Originally I only wanted some scifi fighters sweeping over a landscape. Soon there was a larger ship added. And I when that ship told me it felt a little lonesome… I added another larger one. So everyone is happy now. However, I wanted to keep it simple. Thus it became a perfect entry into my comcept series.

Now what are we looking at here? Could be a group of destroyers flying off into a battle. Ready to deal some damage! :D Nothing too special.

Created with Vue, Worldmachine, Photoshop & Lightroom

Print Detail

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

Rupert Pollard’s Assassin’s Series

Mid 2014 I got contacted by Rupert and asked to do a cover for his Assassin’s Cradle book. The cover itself has a pretty simple setup and I some fun working on it. Mid 2015 then I got the chance to do the cover for the follow up book Assassin’s Escape. We decided to keep the look of the first cover but did go a more complex route with what is to see there. We ended up with a rather cool pic that has elements that surely leave some impression.

Both pics are mixed media and created with Cinema 4d, Vue and Photoshop.

The books can be found on Amazon.

Rupert Pollard Website
Rupert Pollard on Facebook

Cover #2 On:
Deviantart – Artstation – Drawcrowd – CGSociety

Regards

Terraformer

What we see here is, what I imagine, an ancient kind of terraforming device. Left on this planet by some ancient civilization. In the back we can see some giant ruins and leftovers of what once may have been a city. Something must have gone wrong and the planet never fully terraformed. Now the big stucture on the left is still working to a certain degree. But it’s not powerful enough. So only the surrounding areas managed to build some sort of ecosystem that over time grew onto the terraforming structure. Imagine that thing to be like 1.5km tall. So it’s huge and massive. And what are these ships doing there? Maybe they’re doing some science work and measurements of the surrounding areas. It could even be seen as a continuation of my earlier ‘Fallen Sanctuary‘ project – where they explore the ruins we see in the background of this scene.

A more exciting scenario could be that this massive terraforming structure has a meltdown. =D And the ships shit their pants and try to get away. Sounds pretty cool too. =D

This piece gave me some headaches. I was playing around with lots of things even though I wanted this pic to have a more reduced look. Without overloading it with detail. Well, that didn’t entirely work. Even if it looks rather open, there still is quite some detail in the overall scene. More than I originally planned. In the end it may benefit the overall scene. It’s not a perfect piece but it has some neat ideas I think.

Technically it’s Vue that has been used to create the overall scene. The terraforming structure is a model by Nora Nirvaluce that I previously used in a different way in the earlier mentioned collab project. The tree/root like things growing on it were done with The Plant Factory. It has a neat feature where it lets you grow stuff on objects. Needed to learn how that works and this project helped. The feature was also used to give the rocks a unique touch with some strange roots all over them. The rocks were created with Sculptris. The fog/cloud bank was rendered in Vue and took (as expected) ages to finish. I needed the cloud plate for a consistent look though. After rendering it all… Photoshop helped to bring in the final touches, fixes and overpaints that were necessary to create the scene I had in mind.

6571×3000 – Vue – The Plant Factory – Sculptris – Photoshop

Alternative Colour Version
Plate
Plate
Print Detail

This pic is part of The Luminarium’s 27th Exhibit. The topic was ‘Organics’. Some amazing work by some great digital artists in there. Check it out HERE.

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

Alrighty. Here we go. The calendar for YOUR amazing 2016 is now available in my deviantart store. Had a hard time picking the artworks for this one since they all work well for a calendar page. A nice look back at the pieces I did this year. Among a few older ‘personal favs/classics’ we have quite a number of new pieces in this calendar this time. For the calendar design I used Vue to create a neat looking cover image and plates for the month pages. Had some fun with it and hope it turned out eyecatching enough. :) Due to the format I had to cut off small parts of the images but tried to keep the main elements in frame as good as possible. I’m fairly happy with how it turned out this year.

Find it here: http://www.deviantart.com/print/38876699/

Regards,

Red Sands

This picture started as a project for a movie. They had some scenes on Mars and approached me if I would be interested in trying myself on it. I did some concept work and was playing around with a Marsbase kind of idea. I sent them my ideas and they promised to come back to me on how to go on with it. Well, that was 1 1/2 years ago. Nothing happened. Not a single word. So I decided to not write off the extensive work time I already spent on the project and finished it myself as a personal project. The guys I wrote with obviously had no interest anymore. I finished it up right in time for the Mars hype that’s going on right now! =D Flowing water on Mars. That’s amazing news and opens up great opportunities.

Technically I started this one with Worldmachine and trying to create a landscape that sorta kinda could serve as a Mars landscape. I’m sure it’s not 100% realistic (if at all…) but I managed to get some nice variation into the terrain that works well enough for the eye. I combined various terrains with Photoshop and imported them into Vue. Adding the base was a difficult task. I had to work the terrain quite a bit to make it fit the parts where I wanted to place the structures. I’m not entirely happy with how it turned out… but it’s good enough for me to work. Sometimes you have to make a cut and stop working on something. To make it even more unrealistic I played with the idea of some local terraforming around the base.

Overall it’s one of my more realistic ‘looking’ pieces. At least when it comes to the visual feel and photographic presentation. Hope you enjoy the view and who knows… maybe the pic is at least a tiny glimpse at how our future on Mars could look like.

6000×2740 – C4D – Vue – Photoshop

Print Detail

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

Quest For Eternity

This pic was an experiment. I started it August 2014 and saw it as a prequel to my, earlier in 2014 released, ‘The Eternals’ artwork (hence the rather cryptic title for this one). In said picture you can see rather prominently a ship zipping by. I really liked the look of the ship, so I thought “wouldn’t it be funny to see where it came from?”. And that matched with the experiment I had in mind. I wanted to try and work in 16bit colour depth. It was also a test to see how my machine would be able to handle the load. It did well… but saving a larger Photoshop file in 16bit… literally takes ages. Naturally I wanted to have a quite striking image in terms of colours. So the colour depth would make sense. And I hope I got something neat for the eye with that.

If you ask me what this place is then I honestly don’t have an answer. I was fiddling with C4D when I stumbled upon this spikey shape. It instantly made me want to play with it in Vue. After some trying this and trying that I had a scene. Everything fell into place. In the end it was something like a docking or landing area for ships. The spikey things… well, let’s say it’s some ‘modern’ architecture thing. It adds a nice abstract component to the scene. =D

Usually my work is loaded with detail. That doesn’t always work. So ultimately I wanted to do a very clean cut pic for once. Something that’s simple and yet eyecatching.

6000×2739 – C4D – Vue – Photoshop

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

Domes Of Hope

Here we have another collaboration piece. My second in a short period of time. After not doing collabs for a very very long time. Now I do enjoy the outcome of these projects and may do more in the future.

This time I had the pleasure to work with GTGraphics’s very own Tobias Roetsch. He’s also a pretty well known Scifi and Fantasy artist that enjoys some vast and grandiose environment vistas. He explained me his idea and I started to do work in Vue to created a serviceable plate. That includes the landscape and the design of the domes. While working in Vue we both talked about how to bring in a good composition. Then I rendered the material in several passes and combined it in Photoshop. After adding some detail, fx and textures I sent the Photoshop file over to Tobias.

Tobias did his magic with adding the city, additional landscape details and a very neat sunset atmosphere. Then it was my turn again with adding some more little details like the ships and some fine tuning. After that… we pretty much had it. I tried to play a little more with the overall colours but always ended up throwing my adjustments away. The atmosphere Tobias created works pretty much perfect.

Vue, Worldmachine, C4D, Photoshop – 6500px wide

Please check out more of Tobias’s work here:

GTGraphics.de
Artstation
Deviantart
Facebook

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety – Behance

Regards