3D illustrations...

[Gamerprinter]

Alright I just finished the deck plans for the Nelid (worm) Chrysalis starship deck plans. Since everything had to have a biological look, I opted to do the plan in 3D, one bay at time then the corridor, then mashed them together to form the intended deck plan with a square grid. Again, included the 3D transparent view because the layout of the decks are bit odd because the different levels of the bays and the curvature of the corridor... enjoy!

[luxxeon]

Sorry for the late reply to your message earlier on. I got sidetracked with a particular project and didn't check back with the forums. Yes, GPU rendering has really changed the way I work, specifically for rendering large scenes and more specifically for HD animation rendering, which was almost impossible for me to do years ago. I just didn't want to have to sacrifice image quality for the sake of rendering speed, so I held out on creating animations until a few years ago when the hardware and software finally got to a stage where it was reasonable to do for a freelance, independent artist. Honestly, you don't need a very expensive graphics card, but you do need some very specific requirements from the card depending on the software you choose. For example, most GPU render engines require you to have a graphics card with CUDA cores. This is a creation of NVIDIA products, and CUDA has proven to be the easiest format to program around, so many many GPU enhanced software applications take advantage of this for rendering acceleration. The more CUDA cores your GPU card has, the faster it will perform in software which supports CUDA rendering ( Adobe comes to mind as one major brand which has CUDA gpu rendering, but Blender also supports it). There's plenty of third party gpu renderers which require CUDA too, like Otoy's Octane engine. At any rate, moving to a $400 gaming Nvidia card has proven to be one of the best investments I've made for productivity. The other thing being replacing all my hard drives with SSD's.

[codyhay]

I am in love with Wings 3D...

[Gamerprinter]

I am in love with Wings 3D...

Me too, but primarily because I use to use Nichimen Nendo (which became Izware Nendo), which I've used for more than 10 years. Then when I started using Wings 3D, I learned that the developers of Wings 3D, based their development using Nichimen Nendo, since it largely works the same, though some features are different - they are very close, thus I was very familiar with how to use it.

[Gamerprinter]

Normally I don't post maps I'm currently working on for commission, but I thought I'd show this one - it's pretty niche. This is 3 views of a hotsprings geyser pool, (left to right) top view of upper basin with a geyser going off, top down of the lower basin, and a side view of both basins. Now most of this map - the rocks especially are all done in Xara as vector beveled shapes with photo texture fills, as well as the background. The water effects I did in 3D, since I wanted to meet the water challenges in the best way I could. The swirls of bubbling water and the geyser itself would have been less effective done any other way. I used Wings 3D to model the bubbles and geyser, rendered in Vue Creator, the rest finished in Xara Designer Pro. This is a map for Aegis of Empires AP for Legendary Games. Enjoy!

[Gamerprinter]

Another interesting map to this commission series for Legendary Games Aegis of Empires, this is a meteor crater with some interesting locations within the crater and paths leading to them. This is a work-in-progress, because one of the locations will mapped separately, then I'll copy it, reduce it in scale and fit into this map at location L. Another interesting site is the cliff-sided pit at the center bottom, which apparently has a smoking remnant of the meteor that created it. Though I've done craters in vector in the past working well enough. Since this crater is so massive and the main feature of the map, I opted to do it in 3D using Wings 3D for modeling and Vue Creator for textures and rendering. I'm happy with the result. Enjoy!

[Gamerprinter]

Next commission map is the Werewolf's Lair. On the left side the cave/lair and surroundings are all vector bevels created in Xara, but the curtain of vines in front of the cave entrance uses pre-existing vines (actually a bush turned upsidedown). On the right the entire map was done in 3D, especially the pines and spruce trees, including the fallen pine without needles. Though I have an existing Xara created pine tree, with so many, and being so close to them, it just couldn't do them justice - to my standards. So I used pre-existing pine 3D models within Vue Creator, and created the scene... enjoy!