Click to see at full size, 1700 pixels wide
See -- I'm doing the artwork, honest! It's posting that's the problem ... speaking of which, is anyone else having trouble with Blogger lately? Half the tools have vanished in Opera. A few of them show up again in IE, but it crashes all the time. I just installed Chrome in a wild attempt to get back some functionality. Still trying to figure out if it's going to cure the problems.
So, here's a piece I've been working on, in bits, for a long time (as in, months). The figure in the foreground was the work of about three minutes flat. The background, now ... well, that was mostly painted in Photoshop. The only 3D model is the giant spaceship. The ground is just a plane that I deformed with displacement mapping, and colored up with a diffuse map. The hillocks, or dunes, whatever you want to call them, are bits of terrain generated eons ago in Bryce and shipped in here as OBJs. The base render is just ... flat. There's nothing there but the ship and the ground. The sky was hand-painted first and stripped in as a backdrop ... then the render was shipped out into Photoshop, and I've been painting on it since about September! It's built of hundreds and hundreds of details all painted in by hand in about 20 layers. Takes a looooong time.
If you're interested, I've uploaded it a full size -- over 1700 pixels wide. I compressed it a bit to make it a manageable size. It's about 350K, which is not too bad. Looks like a wallpaper? Now, there's a thought! Enjoy.
In fact, I've been asked many times to do wallpapers, and I swear to gods, this is on the agenda. Give me 36 hours in a day and 10 days in a week, and I'll be in business!
Jade, 19 November
