Alien Evolution

Sometimes I like to mess around with HDRis (High Dynamic Range Images). These are images of extremely high quality that you can use for two purposes in 3D renders: they can be a light source, and they can also provide parts of or even the entire surrounding environment.

For example, this is a scene that was lit entirely with a HDRi (as opposed to using spotlights and/or mesh lights):

...and here's one where everything but the main figure (Duster) comes from a HDRi:

Same thing here:

One really nice this about a HDRi is that if there aren't a lot of other elements in the picture (such as nothing but Duster/Candy in the two above), they render really quickly. In a few minutes rather than an hour or more on my current PC with its NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card. 

Now, a "raw" HDRi looks a little strange:

As you can see most of the straight lines get curved around. This is so that when the image is  "wrapped" around the dome that surrounds your image it looks normal. (By the way this "Parking Lot" HDRi is one of my favourites for providing the cold, grey light of urban environments.)

Most of the time I use a HDRi to provide "ambient" light, that is, to illuminate the background so I don't have to put a ton of spots or mesh lights in place. But as the images above show, it is fun and often worthwhile to see what else they can do.

So I was playing around again with the HDRi used for that desert lightning image above. The idea I had was to have poor Duster stripped and deposited into a strange landscape. It worked pretty well.

You can see the similarities to the other desert image above. In fact that's the same image dome rotated about 180 degrees; the lightning bolt is providing the illumination that generates Duster's shadow.

As good as that looked I wasn't satisfied. I wanted Duster to really be in trouble. You see, with the blue sky and clouds, this landscape, as harsh as it appears, nevertheless seems to be on Earth somewhere. Having her dumped helpless and naked on an alien world would up the peril ante considerably.

Fortunately I have another collection of HDRi backgrounds depicting alien worlds. I loaded up one of those. It provided a pinkish-red sky and a very alien-looking moon in the background (though I did have to play with the Dome Rotation and generate a few test renders to get it in the right place). However unlike the desert HDRi that I used for  the image above, this one did not provide a landscape. So I loaded in a nice big ground platform, applied a ground shader of basic dirt, and then added a few large rocks. This test render shows the result of that.

That was more like what I was looking for! Duster's "Where the hell am I?!?" look is even more justified. The alien world we're most familiar with is Mars, thanks to all the images we've seen from all the probes wandering over it for the last couple of decades. I think this looks just enough like Mars to draw upon that collective familiarity we have with an alien landscape, and yet different enough to seem even more alien.

(By the way, notice how high the quality is here even though it's a test render. Again, that's in great part thanks to using a HDRi for a lot of the scenery. Though I did add a distant light to illuminate Duster and the landscape; the HDRi just didn't provide enough illumination.)

I still wasn't completely satisfied, though. I had turned off the depth of field setting so you can clearly see that strange alien moon. But that meant the image lacked one of the main instruments I use for creating that feeling of vast distance: distance blurring. Granted the distant hills and moon accomplish some of that but having objects get fuzzier in the distance really helps.

So instead I loaded a "fog box", a 3D prop which adds some small particulate objects to the render. This is how that looked:

Notice how that creates a better job of creating the illusion of an atmosphere than my first attempt above. That image now looks a little antiseptic, doesn't it? It looks more like surface of our own airless moon than an alien world like Mars which has an atmosphere. And since Duster is alive and breathing rather than collapsing and asphyxiating, there has to be a breathable atmosphere.

However the fog box really washes out that wonderful reddish-pink of the sky. That's because the fog box is from Stonemason's Urban Sprawl 3, so it's designed for an Earth-based city. Notice how it resembles smog? I checked the object's properties in the Surfaces tab and discovered its main colours were greyish-blue. You can definitely see the effect of that colouring in the image above.

Well that was easily fixed. I changed the fog box's Base Colour and Refraction Colour settings to more of a pale pinkish-red and re-rendered.

Much better. I also temperature-shifted the distant light to about 5000, giving it more of an orange colour.

Render it with high-quality settings, do some postwork, and you wind up with this:

Now that I have the setting in place, I may do more with it. I could create a whole story around this detailing how Duster gets to this strange alien world, what adventures she has while there, and how she gets home. But boy that will be a lot of work and I have a lot of other stuff going on, so I think I'm going to leave it on the back-burner for now. Could become another for-sale adult comic like Once Bitten, though!