Throwing together a SF cover concept

Throwing together a SF cover concept

I was putting an old solo adventure for an RPG I published in 1986 up on my website (the adventure was published in 1987, and I seem to have converted it to HTML in 1996) and wanted to create a new "cover" image for it. (The original cover art was done in Fullpaint — think MacPaint, but better).

I had apparently raytraced a pretty nice (very geometric) "aircar" design using Strata StudioPro back in 1996, but I can't open the document and the only image I had was a lo-res 256 color GIF.

So I quickly modeled a similar aircar in C3D and then stuck it in front of my "Particle City" and voila. I'd love to be able to add some motion blur, contrails, engine exhaust, wreckage, fires, and smoke over the city when I have some time but not bad (I think) for about 30 minutes work.

The relevant blog entry linking to the adventure is here: http://loewald.com/blog/?p=3845

The end-result is very much in the spirit of 1980s British SF book covers (doesn't matter what the story is about, put a spaceship and some kind of futuristic city on the cover).

very cool Tonio!
clean and fresh design

cheers,
Alessandro

For reference, here's the GIF I was working from:



(Upon re-examining it, I think the rounded engines look better in the original.)

Note the fabulous procedural terrain shader in the background!

One sphere, two hemispheres, one spline, one lathe creator, three symmetry creators.

Very cool, podperson! :icon_thumbup: I like the whole concept.

Thanks for the positive feedback!

Here's the entire thing with grungier textures and faked in smoke (I wasted a bunch of time trying to get something resembling smoke out of the particle system and finally gave up.)

The smoke was created (very quickly) using a particle effect in Motion, rendered as a PNG, and then applied as a transparent texture on a plane. (I reused the same smoke object three times.)

looks good Tonio!
what about a slight fog? top of the skycrapers should be slightly more saturated than the ground, I mean...

There is a slight fog in it already, but I guess I can mess with the settings.

podperson said:

There is a slight fog in it already, but I guess I can mess with the settings.

Click to expand...

oh, I see... then it's probably too uniform to notice (or the jpg compression has blurred up everything?). maybe you could try to make the Y-axis variation more evident...? (Y in Cheetah, of course..)

As a remarkable coincidence, I snapped this photo as my wife and I walked to lunch in the quad around 1pm. I guess I must have been subconsciously channelling some kind of engineering project.

(Photo taken with iPhone. Rendered in C3D using Skylight set for time and location of photo — rotated sunlight to roughly match orientation of camera shot, used HDR to apply photo (rotated) as reflection map. Added subtle motion blur in Acorn.)

Another variation.

Very cool and very fun! Nice job!!

podperson said:

Another variation.

Click to expand...

Nice all works Tonio:smile: :icon_thumbup:
Bye

looks real

podperson said:

As a remarkable coincidence, I snapped this photo as my wife ....

Click to expand...

I like the version with the "park picture". It looks real! :icon_thumbup: (except the hard shadow edges under the flying objekt). Very nice.

- Novus

Novus said:

I like the version with the "park picture". It looks real! :icon_thumbup: (except the hard shadow edges under the flying objekt). Very nice.

Click to expand...

Yeah it's a shame you can't soften the shadows of the Sky Light. (I could do it in post, but that would be work!)