As always, click to embiggen. If you’re thinking, “That looks familiar,” that’s because like the last rendered image I posted, this one is taken from “I See The Earth!” This one’s embellished little more than the last one, in that I added a road and a couple vehicles. Taking each element in turn:
- The ground is taken from NASA’s CGI moon kit, so is in theory accurate, but the scale I’m sure is all wrong. It acts weird when the camera pans, which I assume has something to do with the displacement.
- I was too lazy to properly texture the road, but decided this was retro-futuristic so could get away with it just being made of Space Metal™. Never mind the lack of off-ramps.
- The stars aren’t right, but unless your name is Neil I doubt you care.
- Roads need cars, so I created the green one. I didn’t like how it came out, so I went looking for other inspiration and found an old Tonka Toys Mini Futuristic Turbo Rocket Space Car. It’s being driven by a Red Sox fan at much higher than the speed limit.
- I got frustrated with texturing the front-most structure, so decided to try an experiment, printing out the UV map and using a lightbox to do hand coloring on a separate sheet of paper, which I then scanned back in. That’s what the more organic texture is made from. The boxes are vector, because fountain pen lines weren’t cutting it.
- There’s an animated version of this I’m not posting. The still below is from a frame or two after the image above, except closer and with the camera following the red car. The lunar landscape looks much better all blurred out.
So that’s how I spent a good number of my January off hours.