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Chromattix β Megahorn Mesa
Published: 2010-08-30 00:30:56 +0000 UTC; Views: 46034; Favourites: 1473; Downloads: 0
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Description
Massive, bulky alien trees are the first to catch the bright light of a new day under a blue sun while smaller, more Earth-sized desert trees seek refuge from the full extent of the day by growing mostly in sheltered parts of the canyon or in the shadows and beneath the megahorn trees themselves. The evolutionary benifits behind their size and shape are still somewhat a mystery, though realistically they would probably store tonnes of water inside, sourced from rivers lower down in the canyon. The "horns" all seem to point in the same direction and are the only parts of the trees that can convert sunlight to energy, like one giant, thick leaf...The pointing direction probably minimises how much direct sunlight it receives later in the afternoon when the sun is at its feircest
From above they could probably even be used as sundails...but who the Hell is gonna bother climbing them? 
Anyway, I've had these strange alien plants in mind for a long time, probably even a few years. It's amazing how much time goes by when you decide to put an idea off for a dry moment. But just as well since I think this would hopefully be an original entry idea for the sci-fi Lost Lands contest
Megahorn trees were modelled in Cinema 4D...everything else done in Vue7 with moderate postwork and effects postworked in Photoshop
All artwork in my gallery remains my own copyrighted creative property and is not to be used, sold or modified without my permission
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Comments: 315
Beautifully rendered! I appreciate that you took time to make the megahorns seem biologically plausible while still being visually evocative. Again, truly great work!
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I can only imagine that companies would harvest those trees for all their wood to use for building materials. The wood has to be so durable and there is so much of it a single tree is probably worth a fortune. But they probably logged them to the point that they were almost logged to extinction, so some interplanetary government places down a law that protects them.
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I imagined them maybe being filled with a spongy or hollow-like material (like bone marrow) to keep them light enough to not come crashing down under their own weight 
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yh,would be one - legendary tree house in one of these Β
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You could have entire tree cities in these things. Especially if you hollow one out
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This is really cool. I like the environment and the scifi feel to it. Nicely done
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The canyons were done in vue7? what do you generally use for textures?
this piece is epic!
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They are procedural canyons, so that helps with the detail factor for a start 
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Thanks for telling
I will be experimenting with 3d art sometime latter this summer or the fall, would you mind giving me feedback suggestions on my future works?
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I have for plenty of people already, so I can't see why not
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I would climb those trees, yes I would climb the hell out of them.
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You should be an illustrator, with this kind of work, the mind becomes fired up on the existence of what could possibly out there, sadly with the failure now of Kepler, it will be a long to before we see again, but thanks toΒ you we can imagine.
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I had no idea anything happened to Kepler 
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I found this through random browsing, and I absolutely love it! All-too-often I see alien landscapes that are totally devoid of alien life forms of any sort, and this is a great departure from that.
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I feel the same way. That's why this year I'm working on an "alien landscapes" calendar ready for sale for next year. And I'm going to make half of the landscapes "barren" (like we would expect a lot of anyway, these will focus more on cosmic events anyway) and about half will have life forms (mostly alien plants though - don't know a thing about designing a decent creature). Living landscapes always seem so neglected in the sci-fi genre. If you're lucky you get a lot of alien cities, but none seem to have any vegetation in them (even ours have trees along streets and such) or if they do they are pretty much just Earth-trees which make me wonder how are they living on another planet
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its beautiful omg ;w;
it would be so cool to see one of those
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It would be awesome indeed
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WOOW. Really. WOOOOOWW! This is so realistic O_O
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Haha! This is so awesome! It's somehow (but not quite) similar to one of my ideas for alien trees. they'd look like erected starfish (or better brittle stars) with the "branches" rooted in the substrate.
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Brittle stars are very cool looking things. I can imagine the "hairs" on them in a tree-form would be used to absorb water from the air perhaps.
Your animal designs are very cool, I spend so much time focusing on plants that I have more ideas regarding them than creatures (the alien creatures I think of are either silly or just too real-animal-like 
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I know it's a problem with aliens, you see some of them, and they look like they're from earth, or they're so following the imagination that they would not be biologically possible. Finding the middle ground is very hard. My aliens seem to me more conservative tha what I would have liked, I wanted to "spice them up" a bit, but with little success. I tried to joint the legs differently, but I couldn't visualise how those creatures would walk, so I decided that the exact number of bones in the limbs will be where the difference is going to lie, at least until (if ever) I come up with something that would be biologically possible and looked different from what we're used to.
If you have done alien plants, I seriously need to take closer look at your awesome gallery to seek for inspiration (if you don't mind, of course).
And last but not least, thank you for the gas giant textures you provided, you made my planetary system possible!
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Yes, knowing about animal anatomy is very critical to making alien creatures that are unusual - but still make sense. I think that's my falling there - learning the muscles and bones even in humans is too difficult for me to interpret artistically 
I so far only have a few other deviations with alien plants in them. I have ideas for more, when I make them depends on my artistic priorities though
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Cool! I went to see your other picture with alien plants and I really liked it! those flying animals were interesting too!
And I guess It's all right that different people are into different things, this way we have something to contribute to one another. If nobody was into nothing, that would suck as hell and we'd be still in the trees throwing stones at wild animals, and if everyone knew everything about everything, that would be pretty boring.
I might have a great interest in animals (I can barely claim to know every muscle in human body or every bump of bone in our skeleton, because I have a broader scope and know bits about this and that throughout the animal kingdom, but however interesting or visually appealing plants might be, their physiology gives me brainpain, and that applies to fungi as well. I have tried to get into them many times, but without success. I only graduated (pardon me, does graduation as a term apply to a grammar school too?) from biology with an A because I got to talk about Anamnia (lampreys, fish, sharks and amphibians) it was a piece of cake, but only thanks to luck. there were quite many questions concerning plants and fungi, and getting those would make happy if I passed at all.
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these pic are amazing you did a great job on them
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I'm sure there are worlds in the universe with such kind of giant plants, who knows. Those trees are so big that people could build a city under them 
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That's a scary-looking dinosaur 
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is there any planet that near of other planet in our solar system ?
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Hard to say, the distance here could be huge and both planets huge, or they could both be smaller and closer together. But I don't think there is any so close. Maybe Pluto and it's moon Charon, or IO - a moon of Jupiter that orbits incredibly close, but I'm not sure it's this close
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Now that... makes me want to write a book. I'm not even kidding, I've already written two and this just makes the ideas explode!!
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Good luck. I for one could never be bothered writing a book
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I bet, I either draw out my stories or write them
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You should go into video game design. These environments are on par with today's games like Halo Reach.
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It would be a cool job, but game companies would only take an artist if they can do a bit of everything. I'd be useless in making Halo-like games since I'd be at a loss as soon as they asked for some highly industrialized scenes, bunker or spaceship interiors etc 
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Well now I can only think of advertising or movies since movies are usually more wide ranged, like an actor or artist can get chosen for certain movies based on the part, scenes, and plot.
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You should go into video game design. These environments are on par with today's games like Halo Reach.
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I was just wondering, did you make those planets using Vue or Photoshop?
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Nah, that's just a Photoshop one I postworked in, sometimes I use 3D, sometimes Photoshop - depends on what kind of look I'm going for or how important the planets are in the scene
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Well, I'm sorta new to Vue and I was just wondering how one would go about creating a planet from within Vue. I know how to create planets from Photoshop but I was hoping I could learn how to do it through Vue as well. Any ideas?
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Maybe make texture maps to apply to the planet (which would just be a sphere) scale it up really massive and push it well and truly beyond the scene so it fades out into the sky (will look stupid in a standard atmosphere, and show through clouds in a volumetric atmosphere, so your best bet is a spectral one with a high aerial perspective setting) Or you can do that, but render it in a solid black sky (load the "outer space" atmosphere and disable the stars) like you really are in space, and impose that render onto the rendered scene later in Photoshop (set it's layer to "screen" and mask out/erase parts of the planet behind clouds and other stuff) You may need to save an alpha image after render too to select and cut the planet from its background easier
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Thanks! I think this might help!
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dude! teach me the graetnis of your photoshop exsperis oh MISTACUL GOD OF ART!
PLZ!
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