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

Comcept 13

Now this one is a Vue render i had on my HD for a while now. Pretty much like my previous Comcept painting. A few days ago i took me a few hours to mess around with it and unleashed a tour of filters on it. As well as textures and adjustment layers and stuff stuff stuff. Quick and dirty. Result ends in a, from my point of view, nice Blade Runner’ish setup.

Basically what i wanted to portrait was a kind of docking station within a huge futuristic city. Now the ships we see have a crew of probably 200-300 people. So the dimensions here are pretty huge. Just the way i like it. All i wanted was to transfer an idea and i hope i do here. Hope you like the vision and style.

6hrs – Photoshop – Vue – Intuos 3

Regards

After some brief experience with the Advanced Photoshop Magazine in the past i now had the opportunity to write a tutorial for the UK Magazine’s issue #60. I picked my ‘Artificial’ artwork for this tutorial. That’s mainly because i made this picture without a tablet. Which means that theoretically everyone with a standard pc setup can create something like this. Another reason was that Terragen was a request for the tutorial. My artwork has a very unique approach to Terragen. To explain that to a wider range of people surely widens the horizon of possibilities. Even if i switched to Vue now it was fun to go back and revisit Terragen for that tutorial. Beside the Terragen part i’m explaining how i did the Photoshop work in this picture. Back then i worked a lot with blending modes. A lot of playing around what worked and what not. Now with a gfxtablet i more flexible when it comes to transparencies. But i still check out how blending modes can affect the look of a picture. Sometimes it gives some fascinating results or helps you out when you are creatively stuck at some point.

I also packed tons of material from the project on the DVD because i wasn’t able to go into too deep specifics within the tutorial! So if you don’t know further then check the PSD files. I’m sure they can be very helpful. There’s planets, textures and the whole artwork itself with all the layers. I’m sure it’s a fun peek into these files!

Advanced Photoshop Issue #60 is available now! Check it out!

There is also new painting new stuff ahead! That means some nifty wallpapers on the way! =)

Stay tuned! Thank you very much.

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

Error 2203

Alright. This is about a usual Windows troubleshooting process i encountered with a problem i had when installing and uninstalling programs… up to failing driver installations. I thought i’d share it with you people. The reason why i’m sharing this bit of info is just because i had a hard time tracking down some info about how i can solve this issue while searching on the net. Maybe this helps other folks out there…

The problem:

For quite a few weeks i had problems updating certain software when it told me “new update available”. I tried to run these updates and always ended up getting errors or failing installs. This was going as far as failing installations of new Nvidia drivers. The drivers DID install… but there were no control panel or anything available. Stuff that usually comes with the drivers just wasn’t there. Also not accessible because of missing files. Very weird. I did try various driver versions. Even older ones. Same problems. I also had a major problem deinstalling the Physx driver. It always ended up saying “Error 2203”. A Java update failed too. The problem was that my Nvidia driver, one that still worked, was a few months old and i really needed to update that one to keep my machine as smooth as possible. The failing driver installs really drove me mad and i started to investigate that mysterious 2203 error.

My solution:

I want to make this short. I really invested several hours into the finding process. What i found out was that my System did not have access to certain temporary folders on my HD. (How can that happen? I seriously don’t know!) Certain install processes need these temporary folders to unload their stuff there for a proper installation. I tried out all the temp folders that i knew windows uses to install things. Nothing worked. Then i found out that there are more temp folders by doing this:

1. Open Control Panel

2. Click on Advanced system Settings

3. Select Advanced

4. Click on Environment Variables (on the bottom)

5. A window opens and on top you see paths to these specific temp folders

Then we find these folders and adjust the rights for our System.

1. Right click on the temp folder and ‘Properties’

2. Select Security

3. Check out the ‘Groups or user names’ for ‘System’

4. Click on ‘System’ and check the hooks beneath it. We need ‘Full control’ activated

5. To activate ‘Full control’ click on ‘System’ and ‘Edit’.

6. In the new window again click on ‘System’ and set a hook on ‘Full control’

7. We confirm that and Everything should be in order again.

Since i’m pretty much sure that i missed something… feel free to check here. That’s the page that helped me solving this issue. Thanks goes out to them.

That ends this rather unusual entry on my site. =) I’m just happy that i managed to get my drivers updated.

PS: No, i have no idea how and why this problem started. It just was there somehow. There must be a reason but i don’t know what i did to make all this crap happen. Very weird but solved! Good good.

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

And again it’s been a while with concept art gallery additions. I took me some time to add a few new things to it. Transporters, fighters and a scene sketch. I should do more in that direction but time is a precious thing. Hope you get some inspiration there! Have fun.

Regards

If you are a serious digital artist then this award is on your list of things you want to receive someday. That is at least how i see it. I’m a long time member of CGTalk now and i have seen some really really breathtaking artwork there. I always looked up to these people and their work. I can remember a time when i was very fresh with digital art and photoshop generally. When i looked through the Cgtalk forums i dreamed of being such a great artist with such amazing vision. I never thought i could get there too. Today i made it and it means so much to me. I almost missed the mail from Paul Hellard. But then i saw his name and checked the subject line and ‘boom’. I just got up from bed and my day was already made! Hard work pays off! You just need to hold on to it and it really can pay off. =)

Thanks to the people who supported me over the last few years as well as the great digital artists on this planet who create new worlds and places that inspire people like me to create their own worlds!

Find the cgtalk post here.

This is one happy day for me!

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