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

Emma’s Refuge

“There’s a high class party going on somewhere. She needed a break, contemplating to leave or not. She certainly has enough of all these caricatures, throwing around senseless phrases and drowning in mindless smalltalk.”

Although I worked on this for quite a while, it was a rather spontaneous decision to go for it. I downloaded a free promo pack of 3d cyberpunk buildings by Kitbash3d. When I started to convert them to make them work with Vue properly, I naturally played around with the objects. I found a neat angle and I suddenly had a scene in my head. Then I discovered that the fine folks at Kitbash3d made a contest. All you have to do is to use the buildings. “No problem!” I thought! =D

I don’t have many night scenes and took this as a challenge. Cyberpunk needs to be at night and even better with rain! Still, I decided to add a couple of elements you normally don’t see too much in a typical Cyberpunk environment. I fell in love with this scene while working on it and I think it’s easily one of my better pieces.

I noticed the potential of the scene very early on and spent a lot of time with details. I took apart the building objects and kitbashed stuff here and there for additional details. The lady was created with DAZ Studio. I sat down and modified the dress quite a bit and it turned out rather good. That dress on the right kind of woman would surely be a sight to behold. Rendering was quite a chore due to all the lights in the background. I did separate renders for the back and front. Which resulted in tons of passes I combined in Photoshop. So yeah, there were tons of adjustments in Photoshop.

8000×5333 – Vue – Photoshop – Lightroom – Kitbash3D

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

Callsign: Firefly

As soon as she entered pilot training school, she was “The Firefly”. Thanks to her skills and relentless will to become the best, that name soon became highly respected among the best pilots in the fleet.

Yep, this one is a pure just for fun piece. A try in doing something ‘portray’ like. I also wanted to dig myself a little deeper into DAZ Studio and its Iray renderer. It delivers pretty neat results and I wanted to know how it works properly with materials and lighting. I didn’t just use a stock figure and tried to create a character myself. Along with modified textures for the character and props. Did have my fun with it and I quite like the result. I guess especially because of the unusual framing of the picture too.

I did use Photoshop for final touch ups. No way around it. Removed some clipping issues and refined the lighting and colours.

6000×2144 – DAZ Studio – Photoshop – Lightroom

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

Calista Square

I started this one years ago and kept it on my drive. Sometimes I tend to keep my stuff laying around for no apparent reason. As if I’m waiting for something. Well, my inner voice tells me to finally release it. It’s scifi cityscape time! It’s certainly been a while since my last one and so far there’s nothing new in the pipeline for now. So this one has to make a splash! It does for me at least and I’m happy to finally share it.

Is there a story to the scene? No. Not really. Inspiration? Yes, sure. Although nothing specific I tried to capture. Still, I wanted to connect this place to my little “Cities Of Linestra” series. Just another city on Linestra, a planet populated with all kinds of cities. Originally it also wasn’t planned to turn this into a project this big. Sometimes these projects decide to take a live of their own and guide you. You cannot just stop there. And yeah, so I added more and more stuff.

However, in the end I was just trying to create a vista/place I would love to see or visit for real. So yeah, I just sat down and had fun. Sometimes that ‘fun’ turned into real ‘work’ but I knew it would pay off at the end. And I was right.

As usual I worked a lot with Vue to bring it all together. But I also used C4D to create variations of model assets I own. You know, to give my scene a more individual look and feel. I think I had this scene done 3 times before I was really calling it done. That is when, having time for your work to grow, pays off. I often need that time. So I ended up adding lots of cool elements I otherwise would have never included into the scene.

I started with rendering a master plate and continued to refine the scene in Vue. That resulted in multiple additional renders that were added piece by piece to the scene in Photoshop. There I changed the overall feel and added some photographic effects. I really enjoy the colours and the overall depth of the scene. Again a picture that allows to dive in, explore and discover new detail each time you risk a closer look.

6500×3514 – Vue – C4D – Photoshop – Lightroom

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

It Must Be Stars

“We just entered the outside perimeter of the city. I heard amazing things but it’s not really visible yet. Just a glimmer on the horizon. We’ve set course and got official permission to enter the inner perimeter. Slowly one big, blurry light became two, then three, four and soon thousands. “It must be stars” I thought, as we moved in closer and the city grew in front of my eyes, with all its life and lights.”

This one originally was a commission request but it ended up nowhere since I knew it would be quite a task if I wanted to maintain my usual quality – and my level of detail and quality was one of the main reasons the client contacted me. In the end there wasn’t enough budget. So I decided not to throw my initial concept work away and gave it a go as a personal piece. I think it kind of ended up like something the client would have been quite happy with. Although I did go a slightly different route when the commission fell apart.

For the look I wanted something ‘ancient/old scifi’ looking. A palace and a city that look oldish and majestic but still have some kind of base in technology. Much like Naboo in Phantom Menace I guess. Of course I drew some inspiration from the briefing material I got from the client. Although their idea was underwater and the scene I created isn’t. Even though the color scheme might suggest it is. It’s more a place or location you would find in the Marvel universe I guess. That’s at least how I approached it.

I certainly would love to explore that city and get blown away by the sheer scale of the palace above the city.

7000×3196 – Vue – C4D – Photoshop – Lightroom – World Machine – Geoglyph

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

Comcept 31 – Battle For New Cydonia

This one actually belongs to my Com-cept series but I decided to go with a more proper title. I started this a long time ago and kept it on my drive after I was done with the main parts. It was a technical training piece. A try to create something like a battle scene. Time goes by and I focused on other projects and ideas. Then Aurora decided to go with the color theme of Orange for their next release. I got back to the piece and decided to polish it up as much as I could. Even though I’m not crazy happy with it, I do enjoy the scene and the things I wanted to learn with it… I did learn. =)

As usual the scene was created in Vue with quite some kitbashing for the ships. I did multiple renders and combined them in Photoshop. There I added the FX and overpainted/fixed stuff I was not too happy with. It’s always fun to add extra detail that makes the scene feel more alive. Last but not least some basic colour tuning in Photoshop and Lightroom. Originally I had a more poppy colour grading but decided against in favour of a more realistic approach.

6000×2739 – Vue – Photoshop – C4D – Lightroom

Part of Project Aurora: Orange

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

In Serenity

The inspiration for this one came from a piece I did in 2014. Sanctuary. A try in doing a scifi/cityscape night scene properly. I thought it would be cool to have a companion piece to it but with a daylight scenario. Something that kind of follows the same composition and setup. Not only being different in the light department but in the environment too. So this one is more based in a nature, mountain area and not in a city. So if you would put prints of them on a wall, on th left Sanctuary and on the right In Serenity, you would have a neat combination of scenes that compliment each other in many ways.

The creative process started with taking apart the 3d elements I created for the scene in 2014. I kept the curvy wall and decided to add a cool looking mural relief kind of element in the middle of it. For the material I wanted it to have a futuristic feel of a material we might not have invented yet. Something reflective and transparent but still very much hard surface looking. Maybe a futuristic kind of concrete. The other elements fell into place while working on the scene. Plants by Xfrog helped to round out the wall with some green. Thanks to Aron Kamolz for allowing me to use his falling ivy like plants on the ceiling elements. The lady was created in DAZ Studio. Background terrains done in World Machine/GeoGlyph2. With all the 3d elements in Vue and a good lighting setup, I rendered several passes of the scene and combined it in Photoshop. Then followed some overpainting, adding additional textures and fixing some issues. Lightroom, last but not least, helped me finalize the colour of the scene.

7000×3196 – Vue – Photoshop – Lightroom – World Machine – XFrog

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

XPrize: Trip

A little while ago I had the pleasure to create some work for “Seat 14c” – a scifi shortstory event, held by the XPrize folks. This particular image belongs to a short story by Justina Robinson. It’s about a young lady, unexplainable events and a futuristic airport.

5000×2813 – Vue – DAZStudio – C4D – Photoshop – Lightroom

Find the event and the stories here: Seat14c

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

The Invitation Pt.2

This one is actually done/finished for a long long time now. Over the past year I constantly revisited it, to fix a lot of tiny things, I wasn’t happy with and now finally reached a point where I am. It’s the second piece of my ‘Invitation’ series. I tried to venture into a different, more character based, direction and wanted to find out how good Vue works with that. Unfortunately not too good. So I had to find workarounds for my technical issues. Especially rendering the skin. Another goal was to create a scene like that as tasteful as possible. With a flair of what I love so much… Scifi.

Technically I worked with DAZ Studio to create the pose I had in mind. A lot of time went into that part, to make it work as good and natural as possible. Not sure if I succeeded entirely. But it’s close enough to what I want. Exported and imported the character into Vue, where I did set up the scene. The door kind of objects were done in C4D to frame the character and give that scene a scifi touch. Rendering went through several passes that were stitched together in Photoshop. A lot of post work, fixing, color tuning was the next step. Overall I’m fairly happy with how it turned out.

8000×5333 – Vue – Photoshop – DAZ Studio – Lightroom

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

Bleeding Skies

Now this one is probably a little inspired by that one map in the first Titanfall game. Pretty cool idea they had there. Giant guns targeting enemy ships in orbit. And sure, old idea! Anyway, guess I really needed to try myself on that. What I also did was to work in 16bit depth to get the most out of the colours. But you feel the load when working it in Photoshop. You definitely need some RAM for it to efficiently handle the process.

I’m a little split on how successful I am with this one. I had to leave out some of the original ideas in favour of a good composition and not make the scene appear to cluttered with stuff going on. These ideas aren’t dead though. =D I just hope the intended dynamic feels comes across nicely and sparks some imagination on what’s happening above the clouds. There’s certainly a heavy battle raging!

7684×3508 – Vue – Photoshop – Lightroom – World Machine

Part of Project Aurora: Red – https://www.projectaurora.art/

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards

SITE

When I was creating my The Ghost terrain asset (quite some time ago now) I decided to play around with the materials I collected for the asset and experimented. This one is the result of such an experiment. Not too much backstory except that I always liked the natural shapes, patterns that you can see of landscapes when photographed from a very high altitude. World Machine in combination with Geoglyph 2 is able to create these natural patterns. I instantly thought it looked like an eye with all the veins going on and stuff. But also an alien planet surface maybe? I decided to add some ships and give it a more scifi feel with that. This one was fun to play around with.

6000×6000 – World Machine/Geoglyph 2 – Vue – Photoshop – Lightroom

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – CGSociety

Regards