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

Frontier

This time we have a collaboration piece between me and Alastair Temple. He’s a fellow artist from the Luminarium artgroup and mostly into Photography. Every now and then he’s going Scifi or Abstract. Here he combined his abstract technique with some neat scifi and asked me to add some additional magic as well. It mainly the space station. I also added some additional detail to the alien structures and worked on the composition a bit. In the end we both created individual versions of the scene.

I had my fun with this one and the weirdly shaped looking structures add a nice sense of mystery to the whole thing. What specifically these are you ask? I have no clue. I leave that to your imagination. :)

Mandelbulb – Vue – Photoshop – Lightroom – 4000×2000

Find Alastair’s version and a little background info on Behance
Find his Website here: http://www.alastairtemple.co.uk/

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – Drawcrowd – CGSociety – Behance

Regards

Return To Chronos Keep

I started this one shortly after I finished reading ‘Hyperion Cantos’ by Dan Simmons. Easily some of the best scifi you will ever read. So, go… get it and read it if you haven’t! I decided to try myself on a scene from the book (and there are so many good ones!). Late in the story our group of characters is sorta kinda trapped at a very important place and they need to stay there. Unfortunately food and water runs out and they decide to send 2 of them back to a fortress kind of place to get food and water. So my scene shows one of them on their way. What we see is how I kind of imagined the environment looking like in that part of the book. In the book it’s sort of described as a desert with some neat atmospheric effects. That ‘atmospheric effects’ part got me. In the end it’s not a super exciting scene I guess. I had my fun playing around with it though. =)

Technically it’s a mix of 3d and 2d techniques. Created with Vue, The Plant Factory, World Machine & Photoshop. I used Apophysis renders to visualize the atmospheric effects. After rendering the scene plate I, as usual, did go back to add lots of elements I rendered separately. I also oriented on the descriptions in the book regarding lighting and colours. Got that part good I think. =)

6500×2967 – Vue – The Plant Factory – World Machine – Photoshop – Lightroom

This pic is part of The Luminarium’s 28th Exhibit. Some amazing work by some great digital artists in there. Check it out here!

Plate
Scene Setup
Print Detail

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – 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

For everyone who cannot get enough about how to create a scifi cityscape, I wrote a little something for 3dtotal.com. It’s not a precise tutorial but I’m going through the creative process behind my ‘From Here I Can Almost See The Stars‘ artwork. A cool thing to be featured on that site. Check it out for the walkthrough and maybe their gallery for some world class inspiration!

Find the article here: Making of a Sci-Fi cityscape

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

Organica

This one started as an experiment. Like many other pics I do for some reason. I wanted to dig a little deeper into a tool called The Plant Factory (TPF). A software created by the guys who also run Vue. After finishing this pic I wouldn’t say I’m an expert in TPF… but I learned something for sure. To a point where it already helps with other projects. However… I used TPF to make roots grow all over the scene. To make it look as if nature decided to overwhelm this place to a certain degree. So ultimately this project was perfect for the then current ‘Organics’ topic of the Luminarium artgroup. It could be seen as a companion pic to my ‘Terraformer’ piece. Maybe it’s even the same planet!!!??? =)

The scene base was created with C4D and Vue. A lot of importing/exporting with The Plant Factory and tons of overpainting and fixing with Photoshop. The last part more than usual. Therefor I decided to play with a more stylized look and made it appear a little more painting like. A lot of time went into refining small elements to make it all look consistent.

Is this experiment a success? I’m undecided. While it sure does show something I had in mind for this scene, there are a couple of technical things I would do different today. Of course I would… because now I know the stuff I leaned from creating this picture. :D

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

Plate
Scene Setup
Print Detail

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

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – 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,