Incredible Inspiration....yum!

[signless]

I just stumbled across this incredible site in my neverending quest to accumulate cool science fiction art...check it out, it's got some niiiice eye candy.

http://desktopstarships.com

Bon appetit, y'all...

 

[teinedraig]

Most excellent - thankyou for the link (my son will go crazy over the mecha stuff - he is six and an up and coming gamer

)

 

[Andrew Boulton]

Some good stuff in there.

It might be worth having a seperate forum for art here, rather than having threads like these scattered all over.

 

[signless]

Here is another page of EXCELLENT Traveller starship 3-D renders. This is good stuff...

http://mateengreenway.com/traveller/traveller.htm

 

[far-trader]

Well, my virus scanner goes nutso every time I open one of the desktopstarship pages. And they want dontations for the site despite having a zillioin banners? Not likely. I support sites I like that are truly going it on their own (i.e. bannerless) and tank sites with pop-unders after dropping the site designer a complaint (pop-unders, what a stupid idea).

Apologies for the rant, the images do look nice but there's an artist site (membership but it's free) out there that is just as nice or nicer and last I was there it had no banners. Have to hunt down the bookmark later.

As for the art forum idea, that's a good one Andrew, maybe Hunter will see it and find room to add it.

 

[Malenfant]

Originally posted by signless:
Here is another page of EXCELLENT Traveller starship 3-D renders. This is good stuff...

http://mateengreenway.com/traveller/traveller.htm

Meh. Looks rather amateurish, IMO.

Here's Jesse DeGraff's site which most people should be fairly familiar with and is pretty good, but I think Scarecrow's material (the Florian and Suleiman Scouts, plus the Sword Worlds book cover) makes even Jesse's stuff look fairly amateur.

 

[aramis]

Mal, Jesse is a hardcore graphical professional. (and to my mind, a different category than fan-done renders, despite Jesse being a traveller fan.)

Compare the renders to those used in most games... if it's better than that standard, it's still professional quality, even if NOT photorealistic.

mateenngreenway.com is fairly good, albeit not photorealistic, redering.

 

[Malenfant]

I wouldn't cite Jesse as a "hardcore graphical professional" really. Qualitywise, he's very good, but Scarecrow's output is more like what an actual professional computer graphics CGI designer would come up with (sincee, well, that's what his dayjob is).

Maybe I'm more critical about it because I know a fair bit about CGI (I've dabbled in it myself, though I couldn't come up with anything like what Jesse does (yet) and I do respect him and his work), but he does lack a little when it comes to textures.

 

[Andrew Boulton]

Jesse's work gives me hope that, if I try hard enough, one day I might be almost as good as him.

Scrarecrow makes me want to sell my computer and take up stamp collecting.

 

[Scarecrow]

Nobody's mentioned Ted Lindsey yet. He's pretty spiffy.

Crow

 

[Malenfant]

Oooh, yes. Ted's work is rather fab.

 

[GypsyComet]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
I wouldn't cite Jesse as a "hardcore graphical professional" really. Qualitywise, he's very good, but Scarecrow's output is more like what an actual professional computer graphics CGI designer would come up with (sincee, well, that's what his dayjob is).

Maybe I'm more critical about it because I know a fair bit about CGI (I've dabbled in it myself, though I couldn't come up with anything like what Jesse does (yet) and I do respect him and his work), but he does lack a little when it comes to textures.

<inflamatory rant regarding artistic style vs "photo-real" deleted.>

 

[Malenfant]

<inflamatory rant regarding artistic style vs "photo-real" deleted.>

If it's down to a case of artistic style then fair enough. Though I'm not really sure where that figures in 3D modelling. The whole point of 3D modelling is to look realistic, isn't it?

Any differences in style come from either the rendering itself (cel-rendered, radiosity, etc) or from how you build your objects (you could choose to build things in a "superdeformed" way, or in a weird surreal style, I guess").

But the work that Jesse's done doesn't look like it's supposed to be anything but realistic. And his texture work really isn't all that great - it's a few bump maps to make the seams between hull plates, and a few decals textures onto it. That could be down to anything from lack of time between deadlines to lack of ability to do more detailed work (I'm guessing it's more the former). Either way, it seems to have become his artistic style to have somewhat simplistic textures on his otherwise excellent models.

 

[GypsyComet]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />
<inflamatory rant regarding artistic style vs "photo-real" deleted.>

If it's down to a case of artistic style then fair enough. Though I'm not really sure where that figures in 3D modelling. The whole point of 3D modelling is to look realistic, isn't it?

</font>[/QUOTE]3D modelling programs are just another tool. A tool that brings the positional flexibility of the camera to what is effectively painting and drawing.

Some painters are Boris. Others are Frazetta. It's the Van Gogh's of the 3D modelling world that get me...