The Pod Bay (Click to enlarge)
A few days ago I posted an entry that my image, The Pod Bay, was selected as one of the twelve finalists in the Vue 3D Environment Competition 2007.
Today, at Siggraph 2007 the final winners was announced. I was happy and surprised to see that my submission was selected as one of the three winners in the competition as second runner up.
The judges consisted of leading experts in the 3D entertainment industry coming from the companies – Industrial Light & Magic, LucasFilm Animation, Polygon Pictures, Electronic Arts, Psyop, Whiskytree, 3D World magazine and Softimage – motivated the choice of The Pod Bay as one of the winners with the following comments:
“A great work. Very interesting design and a great composition.”
“I like the fact that I’m wondering what they are. I keep feeling like they’re a part of a much bigger (science fiction) story that I’m not quite clued in to yet.”
“All parts are well-arranged to produce the impressive colors.”
“It vaguely reminds me of the Myst series of games!”
I needed to get up to speed with Vue and thought this competition was an excellent opportunity to spend some time with the software. This image was the result of some of my experimentation and it took me around one day to complete from start to finish. It was a very pleasant experience for me to get to know Vue better. It’s a very capable application and amazing in many ways, and I will for sure make it an integral part of my pipeline for upcoming work.
I didn’t want to make just a plain landscape render, so I came up with this idea of some Alien Pods populating my environment to bring some interest and excitement into the image. Postwork wasn’t allowed, which created a challenge for me to get as good render as possible straight out of Vue. I usually do a lot of post processing on my images after they have left the renderer like color correction, adjusting balance between elements, combining render passes and many other things. The Pods are modeled in LightWave 3D and then imported into Vue where I sculpted the landscape and the other assets. The texturing, vegetation as well as the lighting and final render is Vue all the way.
You can now also find this image in my 3D Portfolio.
Congratulations! I showed your work with some co-workers here and they were impressed. So I’m not surprise that you’re one of the winners. good job.
Congratulation! It’s really a beautiful image you did there…I was sure all along that you where gonna make the top 3. I’m the guy who did “White Ducks Under The Bridge”. Congratulation again!