In celebration of the sub-freezing snowy winter here in New England... "World of Ice." (Yes, it's Hoth) If you've been following things here lately (and are surprised there is a 'here' lately after so long) you'll know it's all space scapes, all the time now. This is why I learned this stuff so I'm happy to be focusing on the style and subject that interests me. That said - compositionally, I'm in a bit of a rut. Left to right: spaceship(s) - planet. Sprinkle with stars, nebula's and lens flares. I'll have to try to break that up. The texture for the Ice World was created using a mix of maps worked up in 'Fractal Terrains 3' and Digital Heavens' 'Cosmic Pack 3.' This was very similar to the way the gas giant texture for 'Blue Giant' was created. Again the bump spec and normal maps were created concurrently with the diffuse texture map. These were applied to a sphere and then clouds and atmo built off of geometry shells. The Pod Ship was modeled and UV Mapped in Modo. I created a quick texture for it in Photoshop using a tile pattern from Filter Forge. There is a lot more detail than can be seen here... so no doubt you'll be seeing this guy again. The two moons are complete re-runs - the foreground moon was modeled in Z-Brush, last seen in 'Red Sun.' The background moon is the same one from 'Blue Giant.' I did add some texture in post to try to differentiate them a bit. As with 'Blue Giant,' I ran separate passes for each element, rendering masks, diffuse, specular, ambient, etc. which were then composited in Photoshop. The starfield was created from scratch leveraging some techniques suggested by tutorials over at Digital Heavens and some ideas I came up with on the fly. I ended up repositioning the pod ship and both moons trying to find a decent composition. I still think it's leaning hard to the right of the image but there is only so much that can be done in post. I very nearly started the whole thing over from scratch.... but this was really intended as a quickie to kvetch about the cold. 18 hours later... :) Maybe I'll do another, now that I have all of the elements built out. Hope you like and feel free to comment. Once again this is a big picture with a lot of texture detail (8k planet textures!) so feel free to click through and enjoy full size. Stay warm, .:theSea:.