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.
DeviantPrints has a limited time free worldwide economy shipping action until the 15th of december. Head over to my store and find some real hq prints of my work. May it be for yourself or a present for christmas! Digital Art, Photography, Abstract and Fractals… i’m sure there’s something for everyone’s taste. The free shipping is valid as soon as you spend $10 or more on a product. Quite a cool offer i wouldn’t miss! From my experience the shipping and print quality is pretty exceptional. Worth a look.
This project was a lot of fun. Partly because it ended a personal creative blockade after the finish of my ‘Phoenix Rising’ project. Again i was playing with Vue and certain lighting settings. I think i found a good base for future projects now. Rendertimes went skyhigh though. However the image quality certainly speaks for itself. My goal here was to setup (or find a way) to light the scene as realistic as possible. That succeeded and after tons of hours for the render to finish… i eventually had a great plate to play with in Photoshop.
The final result is 65% Vue and everything else Photoshop. Of course i added quite some extra textures to get in the needed details. As well as extra painting in areas that did not turn out too good. The overall Photoshop postwork was done fairly fast. So i’m really happy with the outcome.
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!
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. :)
After a longer period of quietness due to sickness and business it’s time to add a few new things to the site! Here i used a heavier HDR technique than in my previous macros. This gave it that nice soft look and of course the beautiful colors!
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.
This one was created on one evening, just for fun. I tested the performance of my machine in apophysis and fiddled around with the results in photoshop. What i had on my screen in the end looked kinda cool so i thought i’d create a spontaneus wallpaper pack. =) It contains all the important sizes from 800×600 to 1920×1200… 6 digfferent sizes. So there should be a fitting one for everybody!
Have Fun!
Windows 7 ‘HRT’ Theme Pack -> Here – Just download and doubleclick to install – if you have any additional questions… just let me know!
All pictures in this Theme Pack are copyrighted by tigaer-design.com and may not used or reproduced without permission. Thank you very much.
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