Art work for "The Bubble"

Started by DMFW, October 26, 2020, 12:18:06 PM

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DMFW

Mainstream : Esquelle's Retreat

This is one I created earlier this month. I have posted it elsewhere but was too shy to post in the home of Terragen until now ;).

It's part of the content I'm creating for a combined "story and art" world building project called "The Bubble" which I'm slowly putting together on the World Anvil web site. It's going to be a science fiction future history, covering selected aspects of the next thousand years as humanity explores the wider galaxy. I have one major piece of writing I want to finish before I open the site up. That's nearly completed but it is progressing slowly. In the meantime I'm very much enjoying using Terragen to make art work for the project.

The plants are from Xfrog, the insect models are from DAZ and the house and boat use 1971s models on sale at Renderosity. The tiny figures were exported from DAZ studio. The planet (Greenlush) I built using a very helpful clip found in the forums here in a thread about using NASA Blue Marble textures for rendering the Earth from orbit. I created a simple map in Wonderdraft to give me some procedurally generated continent shapes and then used that to replace the Earth textures in the clip, plus some other tweaks with the cloud layers. It's not super realistic but I think it's the right level of realism for the style of the piece. If I'd tinkered around some more I might have enriched the textures. No clouds on the "home" planet because sometimes, well, less is more.... I learned absolutely loads making this image, mainly about populations of objects, planet building and terrain control.

Dune

Very nice work, and an interesting project. I wasn't too keen on clicking that button though, and thought "why doesn't he just post here?" No need for shyness anyway. Do post more!

DMFW

#2
Ah, that was my fault for not understanding the forum software better... I was a little bit confused about the image and link button both being external links, but I can see now that the image can just be added as an attachment. So for the benefit of anyone understandably not wanting to click on an external link, here's the image which is called "Mainstream : Esquelle's Retreat".

Mainstream_EsquellsRetreat.jpg

"The western waters region of the continent of Maroque on the planet Mainstream is a maze of wide and shallow rivers, natural lakes, canals and dams which weave through a landscape of low hills and rocky outcrops, thick with stands of white staff, the heavy scent of uloss blossom and the occasional copse of tipple berry trees. Jade glitterwings cross the open skies between the marshes where they breed, looking like giant dragonflies.

When the famous poet and novelist Anna Esquelle fled from Blue Home in 2793 she established a celebrated Retreat in the western waters, a number of self consciously rustic dwellings that became the centre of an important literary school. Here we see one of the lodges, with Mainstream's companion planet Greenlush, high in the sky overhead."

DMFW

Here are my two most recent pieces for this series. These benefited from helpful clips downloaded from this forum for constructing a gas giant and for the moon. They gave me a great starting point to then further tweak my own settings.

Carillon-V.jpg

Carillon V is a small gas giant in the Carillon system, orbiting beyond the frost line and with an atmosphere consisting of about seventy seven percent hydrogen, nineteen percent helium and three percent methane with the remaining one percent composed of a mixture of trace gases including some poorly understood phosphate compounds in suspension which might be organic in origin and lend an unusual purple tint to the clouds.

The planet has three moons large enough to be spherical under gravity.

Carillon V is best known as the location of the Great Hammer. Construction of this rival to the Luminal Forge began in 2485 on the inner moon of Mjölnir and it was to become a key asset for the new Republic when it split from the Solar Group.

Here we see Mjölnir above the cloud tops of Carillon V as seen from an approaching supply ship.


Carillon-V-The-Great-Hammer.jpg

The Great Hammer was a strip engine manufacturing centre which came online at Carillon V‌ in 2485.

By providing an alternative to the Luminal Forge on Io, it loosened the grip of the Earth centred powers in the Bubble and is considered a key event which supported the creation of the Republic

The innermost moon of Carillon V is called Mjölnir and it was here that the anvil for the Great Hammer was constructed in the form of an advanced field focus concentration station. Mjölnir has a high inclination orbit around Carillon V which takes it over the poles. This unusual geometric configuration offers certain advantages over the set up for the Luminal Forge around Jupiter. When Mjölnir crosses the magnetic field lines of Carillon V at the poles, the concentration station can deliver a powerful pulse which allows for higher energy level manipulation as a strip engine is tuned.

Here we see fountains of cascading field lines radiating in tortured energies made visible above the focus engine as the magnetic field lines of Carillon V are hammered into the tiny black hole being held in suspension by the focus anvil. When the process is complete the strip engine will be installed within a flicker drive housing, providing the essential mechanism that allows the limitations of the speed of light to be bypassed.


Mainly Terragen but the energy fountain is postwork using an apophysis flame and a little bit of painted lightning from photoshop. The anvil was made by me in Hexagon (with successful help from this forum about import issues, although in the end I've decided to sink it into the crater where it is less obtrusive), the spacemen come from DAZ and there was postwork to create the background stars.

Dune


sboerner

Great images and imagination. You've obviously put a lot of thought into the background story, which makes them even more appealing. And thanks for reposting them here – for some reason the Google image was a little blurry. Keep up the good work.

DMFW

This one is called "Carillon IV : East of Eastur"

Carillon-IV.jpg

Carillon IV was first colonised in 2482. In 2537 it became the new home of the Pasteract when they were exiled from Earth early in the fifth dynasty of the Resource Management World Government.

In the 26th century, on the windy green plains of Carillon IV the New Primitives rode Arabian horses and herded boola beasts between the silver towers of long abandoned ancient Asamack Response citadels.

They shared the world with half a dozen Pasteracht communities who had their main temple at the lakeside city of Eastur. The Pasteracht were cultural refugees from all the continents of Earth and they were signatories to the Old Charter with the rights of the Firstborn.

Here a few wild horses gallop on the grassy expanses that stretch East from Eastur, overlooked by the colossal relics of the extinct Asamack civilization.


This was a reasonably quick and simple image but as I am near the beginning of my Terragen learning curve, I'm trying to learn at least one new thing each time and I definitely learned a few things with this one. Here it was mostly about the reflection shader and also control over going deeper into the layout and look of clouds. I wanted the Asamack Response towers (which were quick objects knocked up in Hexagon) to blend into the sky, breaking through the cloud layer to emphasise their distance and size, but at first they blended too well and the specular reflections looked like fragments of clouds. I was trying to make it a little visual puzzle to pick out the shape at the top of the two right hand towers but the puzzle was too hard until I added some colour to the reflection, dropped the reflectivity and increased the surface roughness. Now I feel it's just about right. The vibrancy of the image is quite high and I did spend some time messing about in photoshop and thinking about toning it down before deciding (as I quite often do) that I actually liked the way it came out of the render best and I wasn't going to alter it. I've kept the foreground very simple as I wanted the feel of an empty windswept plain and the terrain surface is very basic too (also got a little deeper into the possiblities there), but I kind of like it not over complicated. In my imagination, before making this image, the Asamack towers weren't anything like so massive but creating this art work fed back into how I now think of them and in a good way. Terragen is so great at conveying a sense of enormous scale, it's lovely to take advantage of that.

Dune

I like this, as it's very 'simple' and serene. And nice that you describe your story and the things having to do with its creation. Keep it going!

DocCharly65

Somehow this rich coloring is very encouraging... good for everyone in these times :)  Like! :)

Jo Kariboo

A lot of imagination here, I particularly like the image with the crater!

DMFW

This is called "Helldrone : North Tycin Volcanic Region"

Helldrone-North-Tycin-Volcanic-Region.jpg

The planet of Helldrone can be found in the double star system of Darquin not far from ByRoute‌ 45.

Helldrone is a little larger than Earth and orbits within the habitable zone of Darquin alpha which is a yellow main sequence star with spectral characteristics similar to that of Earth's sun. Darquin beta is a red dwalf travelling in a much more distant orbit around the primary star and bright enough to make a noticable difference to the pattern of daylight when it is above the horizon, whilst being distant enough even at closest approach to cause only minor temperature variations on Helldrone.

The "yellow" day on Helldrone is determined by the planet's rotation and is a little less than twenty hours long. The "red" day is governed by the rising and setting of Darquin beta. Both stars may be visible at once, or only one or neither, leading to a complex interplay of light and colour.

The southern hemisphere continents are called Ucyn and Tycin. Ucyn spans the equator and is the larger of the two, whilst Tycin is a more elongated land mass which stretches from the mid lattitudes all the way to the south pole.

The northern tip of Tycin runs along a fault line between plates and there is a region populated by many active volcanoes. It is also a region with a temperate climate and fertile soil and is the primary area of settlement for humanity with much agricultural activity, even on the slopes of the volcanoes.

At the time of the Bubble, Helldrone hosted a moderately sized human colony which was part of the Solar Group.

The history of Helldrone is obscure and poorly documented. Before the humans colonised the system we know that it was settled by some schism of the Tetratic Empire who abandoned it after three thousand years. Long before the Tetratic exiles first arrived, the Querequian cultures had ceded space to an Amnyine enclave, which seems to have been locally important in that age. Even earlier, there are some archival records suggesting that the Grumm maintained a base in the system and before that there may have been a Cata-Zin presence on the planet, but the evidence for these ancient occupations is increasingly thin.

In this image, two hikers stand on the rim of "Old Grumbler" in the northern volcanic region of Tycin, looking north and west towards the equator where Darquin beta is setting.


I've been learning World Machine so I can use it with Terragen and have gone so far as to get myself a licence. I used World Machine to create the volcanoes here, then blended them with native terrains, but Terragen did most of the rest including the double sunlighting and the volcanic ash cloud. A bit of scale added with some imported models, including a free ship from Turbo Squid and a free tent from Renderosity. The tiny figures on the rim were exported from DAZ Studio. There was a bit of postwork to boost saturation and vibrancy. I don't like to overdo those effects but sometimes it just seems like the right thing to do.

Dune

World Machine is great, but you can also use the internal craters. Just place them where you need them (as a stack), and adjust parameters until you have what you want. And if you get Daniil's Erosion plugin, you can make terrific craters, even masking outflows and such.

DMFW

Thanks for the heads up about the erosion plug in! I'd not come across that before and didn't realise you could achieve those effects that way. I must admit, the ability to apply natural weathering effects was one of the big things that attracted me to World Machine but I might have been able to do that more cheaply with this plug in. Still, World Machine has a lot of other virtues and I'm having fun playing with it, so I think it will still be a nice tool to have.

DMFW

This is the Temple of Chromatic Enlightenment on the planet Silusia Alpha

SilusiaAlpha-TempleOfChromaticEnlightenment.jpg

The Temple of Chromatic Enlightenment is an ancient Amnyine site which can be found on the continent of Seldamar on the planet Silusia Alpha. It lies not far to the south of Rillyon, the capital city of the Rain Cities League, in a zone called the Jungle Preserve. The Temple is currently under the custodianship of the Thinderin Light Guards, who maintain the physical and spiritual security of the site and look after the pilgrim bands from several different species that are occasionally permitted to undertake the temple meditations.

Most of the Temple lies beneath a roughly conical hill where there are great vaulting chambers, hallways, chapels and other places for contemplation and assembly, hollowed out of the stone underground. The white Melding Minster which can be seen crowning the summit is only a fraction of the entire structure.


I've switched a bit of focus to writing and artwork using other software for my project over the last month but returned to Terragen for this image. I did have something quite clear in mind which I wanted to illustrate and it included the cliff over the sea, the jungle and the temple hill behind it. I used a tutorial from terratuts to get me going on the cliff which was very helpful. I learned a lot more about terrain nodes from the tutorial and also had some more adventures in how to combine procedurals which have definitely taught me something for the future.


Whilst I'm reasonably happy with this image and it is pretty close to what I envisaged, there are some things I didn't know how to do and where it might be refined I think. Firstly I would have liked a road along the edge of the cliff top, which runs north/south in the associated story but we might be permitted to imagine it takes a small diversion into the jungle here ;) . Secondly I think the sea could probably be improved. It looks a little too calm and more like a lake than the ocean it is supposed to be. I did experiment with a clip file from the forums which gives some nice close up rolling waves with foam. The problem there was that the frequency was at odds with the scale of my image and when I tried tinkering with it, I couldn't get something that sold me on it being the sea any better than tweaking the standard shader did. I suspect if I spent more time on this, maybe I could do better. Suggestions welcome! Finally, another thing I would like to have done (but it wasn't essential) is to have a sky completely covered by low grey cloud. This Rain Cities region is supposed to spend most of its time under cloud and rain so we are looking at the Temple on a slightly atypical day (but we also know such days exist occasionally, so that's fine). My experiments with 100% cloud cover didn't convince me, but again I might just have been using the wrong kind of clouds.