uxmal750ad

Decided to try another Earth-like scene and go for more realism in my landscape.  I kept tweaking until I was happy with the morphology of the monolithic stones and ground-cover.  I'm particularly pleased with how the campfire turned out.  I originally thought it would be difficult to do, but it actually turned out to be one of the easier elements of the scene.

Here I'm illustrating a lone female traveler who has decided to come to this ancient set of standing stones.  She has traveled far from home on her pilgrimage to this location as she seeks from her ancestors something important.  As the sun sets and the landscape becomes illuminated by the nearby gas-giant, this traveler will experience a communion with the natural environment and the ancient people who erected these stones unlike anything she has felt before.

I used Vue to render the landscape for this image, Daz to generate the female character, and Photoshop to add in the planet and moon.  I hope you enjoy the image.  If you have any thoughts, please feel free to make comments.

Ancient cultures the World over had Gods which dictated the rain.  Even early people understood the necessity of water to have life.  In this image, I'm illustrating a scene on an alien world as one of its inhabitants looks up in appreciation to her own rain deities for the plentiful life-giving water they provide her and entire village.  On this moon and at this location, the distant gas giant along with two inner moons align with the massive waterfall creating the illusion of each world pouring out it's gift to the land.  The inspiring scene must surely give rise to this people's mythology and views on cosmology.

I used Vue to render out the landscape for this scene, while Daz was used to create the female character and Photoshop to insert the gas giant and moons.  Please leave a comment and tell me what you think!  I'd love to hear your thoughts...

Stellar birth is a messy affair.  Planetary birth is even worse. The chaos of young planetary disks does not only cause huge collisions, but also the ejection of entire planetary bodies.  It's very likely our own solar system lost a planet or two due to interactions with Jupiter.  Here I'm envisioning a gaseous planet with a companion moon still gravitationally attached which has been ejected far from its parent star. Its place of birth was originally in a vast star forming nebula which is also in the process of tearing itself apart due to strong stellar winds blowing off the massive young stars. As the rogue planet enters the void of interstellar space to endlessly orbit the center of the galaxy, it can (for now) look back at the spectacular nebula which was once its birthplace.  

Photoshop was used to create everything in this image.  I used my personal set of cloud brushes to paint the nebula as well as the texture for the gas giant. The planet is a modified version of my Saturn stock image which can be found here:  fav.me/d8f7djy

The nebula from this image was also used in my recent terraspace scene "The Mists of Niflheim" found here:  fav.me/dc1z6i0

I've wanted for some time to compose another image which focuses primarily on a nebula as the central theme.  In this scene, which I'm calling "The Mists of Niflheim" (Pronounced NIF-el-hyme), I've drawn heavily on my previous work "End of an Era".  However, rather than focusing on stellar and planetary death due to the demise of a star, here I'm focusing on a spectacular landscape which must surely be repeated millions of times in our galaxy alone.  I've often wondered, what view must be visible from a planet which lies near an extensive gaseous stellar nebula?  This is my answer to that question...

I decided to call this place Niflheim because this was one of the Nine Worlds from old Norse mythology and basically translates to "Mist Home", "Abode of Mist" or "Mist World".  Niflheim was primarily a realm of primordial ice and cold which held the frozen rivers of Élivágar and later became the abode of Hel, the goddess daughter of Loki.

The landscape in this scene was composed using Vue while the nebula was painted separately in Photoshop then added as an alpha plane during the final render.  Turn off your lights, view this scene full-screen, and let me know what you think!