Two hour challenge

 I gave myself a challenge to produce some science fiction art in two hours (full disclosure, it was probably 2 hours 15-20 minutes).

I started with World Creator 3. I intended to export the height map and make the work completely Blender-based, but I'm not yet proficient at getting the materials right, so I decided to use the landscape render as a background.

World Creator 3

Happy with the clouds. Time to save out to Affinity Photo, where I changed the aspect ration to have more sky.


Why more sky? Well that's where gas giants live. This one was created in Blender. I used the Planetarium add-on, which is really just a set of Blender files set up with some amazing node trees that handle atmospherics, clouds and surfaces. In point of fact I dumped nearly all those features, using an edit of Jupiter's planet texture that I remixed into an 8K beast. I added some different colours, and saved with a transparent background for easy placement.

The backfrop ready. A few kinks, but good enough. With more time I'd have worked in some extra cloud layers. Maybe even a couple more moons.

The final parts are the weakest, I think. No time to build assets. The original plan was for a landing pod and parachute, with an occupant sat at a camp fire. Maybe I'd do that one next.

So, plucked from my box of unfinished assets: Bacta Tanker, designed for a Star Wars roleplaying game campaign that's still waiting to be finished.

Then a little rig that I built to practice UV mapping and texture creation. You'll notice that the model is acompanied by a shadow catcher. That's a ground plane that is invisible but renders just the shadows that fall on it.

Finally, the meet-up. These figures are generated using Human Generator 3 plugin for Blender. It's a great value solution for quick, highly configurable, well detailed people. There are more powerful apps, but this is such a great tool.

No time for space suits, Dr Jones! Yeah, I was past two hours at this point so I didn't even provide the poor fella with a proper helmit, it's just a crimped cylinder.

So rushed that I didn't have time to set up a shadow catcher, so I used the old method. Copy and flip the figures, arrange them into the shadow position, then apply a blur. 

I might allow myself more time, on the next one. That said, the reason my output is so small is because I'm put off by the amount of time all this takes, to do things to a polished state.