In February, Drawbridgep posted a couple of images which I was rather impressed with.  One was his version of the building of the FTL1.  John Harris is the original artist who painted "The buiding of the FTL1" (at least I think that's the title).

John Harris is an artist which I very much dig.  His style commonly depicts scenes of great size, detail, and depth.  I don't know how Harris' mind works but I appreciate how his visions have been shared with us on his canvas.

The building of the FTL1 is a particularly impressive painting for me because I want to actually be there seeing this big ship built in real life!  Consequently, I wish I had a big version of it for myself to hang on my wall someday.  I don't know if I could ever be lucky enough to find a big print of it.

In any case, building my own version of it in C is a really great big huge fat challenge and should be a lot of fun.  The modeling for such a project is not for the faint of heart.  The lighting and texturing is also not something that can be achieved without some serious energy.

To be honest, I don't know if I have the skill to pull this off but if I don't try it, I'll never know.  I've been stewing over trying this project ever since Drawbridgep posted his version of it and also his image "500".  The color and lighting in "500" is also something I'm really impresed with (not sure why, just am, who knows how art works? not me).

Building an image off a painting is starting to become an art form unto itself that I'm sort of becoming skilled at.  FTL1 though is particularly hairy as the scale of the thing is sort of beastly!  Here is my first shot at just getting the super big basic pieces in.  This took about three hours to figure out (NOT EASY!).

Everything you see in this image is made of planes, cubes, or two other super simple splines I made.  I have six lights in the image so far and one primivol fog object (primivols are really great for atmosphere stuff like this).  No texture or color yet.  The main thing so far is just to see if I could even attempt such a project.  Looks like it's feasible.

Sometimes, a painting has geometry or lighting or something that makes it basically impossible for me to attempt.  Based on these results though, I think I have a chance.

There was a lot of playing around with camera angles, camera focal length, and scaling of stuff to get this image to this point.  As I said before, reproducing something is an artform all by itself.  The process I have used so far is just out of my own head.  I've never really read or heard of a process which explains how to do this sort of thing.

This particular scene was a little more tricky than others I've tried.  With some patience, I think it's coming along.

Stay tuned as I beat on this thing.  I can already tell there's 1000's of objects in my future!

-Kix