Sci Fi Scene

Flickr compresses images, affecting their quality. I rendered this one multiple times at varying resolutions and light settings and each time uploaded it to check distortions caused by Flick's compression algorithm. This is the least bad. The original file looks better.

 

I am making progress with Blender. Never thought I would be able to make things like this. When I first opened Blender, I had no idea what to screen showed, and it took me a full day to work my way through the first 30 minutes tutorial I had a go at. The first task being somehow getting rid of the infamous default cube!

 

Still, I figured if others can do it, so can I. If something is learnable, I can learn it. It took some determination though.

 

The alien space ship is made by applying the discombabulator on a torus mesh (a technique explained by Kev Binge here), then I removed a ring of protrusions and replaced it with a cylinder in which I made windows (inset faces, extrude along the normals) with an emission shader for the lights.

 

For the city I used the same technique as the one I used to make the carpet with the piano some time ago:

 

I first made a dozen or so low poly buildings and put those in an object collection.

 

Then I set up a plane as particle emitter but instead of emitting hairs I made it randomly emit hundreds of buildings from the collection at random heights. This is a lot quicker than having to copy/paste and resize buildings manually.

 

Light effects are created with area lights. And the fog is created with volumetrics.

 

By keeping everything low poly, it is possible to make such scenes even with my computer. The most important thing is a good graphics card with decent cooling.

Done