Valis Licentia
Valis Licentia
This picture is the perfect example of the famous ‘creative spark’. I never had the intention or plan to do a picture like this one. I never had a concept to this one in mind. I just sat down and worked it out. Everything fell to its place by accident when i was playing with the Vue 9 pre release version. Out of nowhere a creative flow started to happen.
It basically started with trying and playing with Vue again. Creating a nice mountain terrain and adding trees. Playing with atmosphere and lighting. This is actually how a lot of my personal projects come together and start out. Ultimately i had this nice mountain range, atmosphere and forest in front of me and thought… “yes… that’s it… go for it”. At this point no plans for a scifi setting. I also wanted a river in the scene. Some time went into the placing and adding and getting it right of the river part. Then the landscape part was done and i did a large multipass render of it. It took 18hrs to finish. That was early november i think. I really liked the result. The multipass also allowed me to extend the planning for the pic.
I thought around a while and found that some sort of scifi haven/port for ships would be a cool thing. So i added the towers. The original idea was to add one much closer to the camera on the left. But that did not work out well and completely ruined the composition for me. So i decided to move it farther back. That way the atosphere had much more space to unfold its nice detail and lighting. And the eye has a much more pleasant view on the overall scene. I decided to add more towers in the back to get some more depth into the scene. Not sure if that works 100%.
The Photoshop work, or ‘post work’, included refining of the atmosphere and bringing out details that i wanted to pop a bit more. Since a lot of elements, like the towers, were added in the process i had to do some extra integration work to make it all sit right in the image. I also added some atmospheric beams to bring out the atmosphere. I think that works nicely.
Not knowing what i was going to end up with was a nice thing. Even today i made last changes to the pic. Now every pic should have some sort of message huh? I guess what the pic is trying to say is that even highly developed races should be able to merge their structures into a foreign environment without disturbing it. Something ‘we’ are not able to do. The towers in the pic certainly have a very industrial look to them. Nonetheless they’re able to keep the environment untouched.
Photoshop – Vue – 5000px wide
Plates and Progress & Print Details
Regards
April 30th, 2013 at 09:44
Absolutely stunning! Awesome!