[SoNE Ep. XI] Hiding in the Rancor's Den

The eleventh episode of the Shadows Of Nar Eurbrikka just went live on Eurobricks. The Rebels take their stolen supercomputer to the rural surface of the planet Kuat, known for its shipyards located on a ring surrounding the planet. Meanwhile, the Empire does everything it can to get the precious computer back - or so it seams...

 

I had the honor of doing some of the promotional images for this episode, and you see the result above. The supercomputer was the main thing to build, and I enjoyed finally having the opportunity to use walkie-talkies as details, something I've been wanting to do for a while now. I had to restrain myself from using lots of grey in order to keep the contrast high, so I forced myself to use white, and I think it looks pretty good. The ladders were a nice way to quickly build a wall while retaining a high level of uniform detail that doesn't disturb the image. The ground layer was new for me. I've been looking at the way castle builders deal with rocks for a while now, and I think it's fabulous. Now I finally more or less get it because I wanted to use it in this creation to keep the cross section of the ground from becoming too cartoonish, so I'm pretty happy with the result, and will probably be using the technique in future creations. Finally, I had a lot of fun playing with the vegetation. My fellow organizers suggested to use the lavender stalk piece, so I did. I might have gone a little overboard with it, but that's the beauty of digital creations. I needed a piece to match it though, and the lavender palette is quite restricted. I ended up finding this hairpiece from the elves line, which I had to use a substitute for because it isn't available digitally. But it resulted in some pretty alien vegetation I really dig.

 

This is the first creation on which I really tried to fully embrace the capabilities of my render program (that's Blender), since it allowed me to have two distinct lighting conditions for the two parts, which helped to create the contrast in the picture. I tried to keep everything logical though, so all of the lights you see could theoretically be replaced by LEDs etc., so I hope you appreciate it. Another big task was to apply the decorations, because I had to make them all myself. I'm pleased by how the stormtroopers turned out in the end, because it was a real pain to match the image with the complicated geometry of the helmet. Once that was done, it was on to rendering. It took about twelve hours spread over two sessions, and the underside is still quite noisy, so don't zoom in too much there ;) I guess with a real camera you can run into similar issues too though, so I think it's sufficient.

 

So I hope you like it! I really enjoyed working on the contrast between technology and nature, indoor and outdoor, grey and color to create a nice picture. Be sure to check out the newest episode of SoNE on Eurobricks!

Done