 | PERRY RHODAN - Immaterial City
The basic idea behind this illustration was to create an almost romantic image of the Skarabo space ship's arrival to the legendary and immaterial City. The original scene description was delivered by the Hans Hubert, the Author of the Roman.
The production of this image was very "layer" oriented due to the short time limits for the production: The Scarabo Spaceship was reused in both covers 2436 and 2439 but the whole background scenery and especially the city were build from scratch.
Immaterial City - BackgroundLeaning on many already existing Perry Rhodan cover artworks, 3d-io made intensive use of 3D software and in-house tools and assets for the creation of the 3D illustration. The tight deadline allowed almost no creation of concept artworks and alternative proposals.
The choice fell on 3ds Max as main 3D Applications for the rendering, Vue Infinite was used for the complete foreground, landscape and atmosphere generation and WorldMashine for the fractal landscapes.
Faced with the high resolution requirement of the cover artworks (2400*4000 pixel) demanding the best quality and maximum speed, 3d-io used the production proven FinalRender, allowing rendering times in less then 10-20 minutes per layer for the final production renders. A combination of Global Illumination and FinalDirt was a perfect set of visual boosters for a seamless integration into the Vue landscapes.
|  | Immaterial City - Making OfThe 3D city was a design solution combined of dozens of hand-made science fiction buildings and fractal building blocks spread radially around the city centre. Vue Infinite network rendering was used for the foreground landscape and vegetation design. The scene counted about 6 million triangles and mostly in-house developed procedural shaders. |
 | Immaterial City - Final Compositing
The final image was set up in a diagonal composition from the lower left corner to the upper right corner, using the Skarabo Spaceship, light beams and the rocket as supporting guides for the eye-flow. After the 3D elements were placed into the scene, a lot of compositing work went into the adjustment of colors and depth: light beams, lens flares and glowing lights in the city were painted in Photoshop and combined with generated smoke and dust in Max with the AfterBurn plugin. |       |
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