Saturday, June 18, 2011

Touching base here, with some SF fantasy, and a cool storyline







My apologies for vanishing on you for a few days ... as per my last blogging, I'm working my way through the process of having pleurisy, and it's faaaar from fun.

So I'm just posting a set of images I did a little while ago, while working up some ideas. They're very quick, and based around a theme...

Edit: Nope. The images were remote linked from another site, and they have ... gone. I don't even have them anymore. So I'm replacing them with filler art from "some years later" -- trying to FIND the missing images on some HDD somewhere. But till then ... oh, well. 

About 1000 years from now, hyperspace travel depends on a special kind of people who can see, or feel, or sense, the currents of subspace. These people are priceless because they can take ships through the void, planet to planet or galaxy to galaxy. There's not many of them, so they're highly prized -- and they don't occur naturally. You find someone who has the potential to swim in hyperspace, and you "modify" them for the job. The modifieds are incredibly rare, and precious ... and in typical fashion, there's an illegal traffic in them. There's a whole wing of the Space Corps dedicated to finding them, liberating them and stamping out the trade, but in fact it gets busted from the inside by a number of the "navigators" who discover that they can reach further than hyperspace; in fact, they can reach into the incredible cybernetic systems that run everything in the year 3000. It takes a network of seven of these "navigators" to bring down the cartel that traffics in people like them...

"My gods," you're saying, "that's brilliant!" Well, it's certainly a new spin on a bunch of old ideas, but I'm not going to tell you it's my idea! It's based on THREE previous ideas, all welded together and given a new spin. If you're into Doctor Who, think back to Warrior's Gate, the story about the Time Sensitives who piloted ships through the timestreams, and there was an illegal traffic in them. (It was a Tom Baker story, and I think it might have been in the last season he did, just prior to turning into Peter Davison.) Then, think back to Wing Commander, which featured a subspecies of human who could navigate hyperspace in their heads. Uh huh. Then think back to the book, Dune, in which the navigators were "modified," or somehow mutated by ingesting spice, which let them pilot starships.

None of these prior projects featured any navigator who was female -- not one. Therefore, none of them had navigators who were nubile young women who looked fantastic swimming nekkid among the stars. But this is where CG art likes to go these days! And here's seven images featuring these remarkable folks who can swim in hyperspace (and who don't look like grizzled prospectors, or look like they're steadily mutating into sandworms!) and also reach into the realm of cybernetics and beat the cartel from the inside. Also, none of the prior projects featured anything like a Space Corps dedicated to stopping the illegal trafficking in these folks, so you'd add in a cross between La Femme Nikita and Space Police ... Roy Dupis in black leather, rescuing a bunch of drop-dead gorgeous super-women in space, in 3000AD.

Oooooh, my goodness. Can we say, "Commercial potential?"

The backgrounds are digital paintings based on Hubble photos which have been heavily worked in several ways. Then the Victoria 4.2 model was posed in freefall. Then the renders were finished with iconic overpainting in GIMP, using .abr brushes, for some interesting effects.

Now ... pills. Rest. Gak.

Jade, June 18