A Space station

[Francissimo]

Hello everyone
I'm curently playing with sketchup and photoshop to depict a big space station with industrial and commercial purpose.
At first it was just some space art stuff but the station became bigger and bigger (playing with sketchup 3D wharehouse is a bit like playing lego) and i'm now thinking about a map with some zoom on various sections.
here's the first wip:
space.jpg
Feedbacks are welcome, i'm still not sure how i'll map the station, i was thinking of a global view like this in the center, with some focus on various parts all around.

[Diamond]

Wow, so I'm a little in awe of you right now. That is... words fail. I guess if I can dig for ANY criticism, it might be that it could become hard to pick out station detail against the detail of the planet below. Maybe change the planet to a gas giant, a moon, or a planet with large cloud cover so there's less distraction from the station? But that's it. Other than that - totally freaking amazing.

edit: And I just noticed that the eyes on your avatar glow and dim! Have they always done that?

[Ilanthar]

Wow... You're way better than me with SK! I'am struggling with my orbital station for the Current Challenge, and it's clearly a poor thing compared to this.
How did you use SK Warehouse? If it's what I think, it's quite a mess and I didn't find it easy to use...

[Francissimo]

Thanks Diamond
I'm strugling with the background with this one, never really satisfied in how the space station blends with the background. Here's another attempt with a gas planet, and some lights in the darkest parts.
About the SK wharehouse Ilanthar, that's a huge base of 3D model made by other people on lots of subject. For this one i get a bunch of models, cut some pieces and merge others to get the station.
EXPORT4.jpg

[Falconius]

Looks fantastic. I much prefer the newer upload with all the outlining. Also the dark background puts the focus where it should be, on the station.

[johnvanvliet]

for gas giants i found a rather cool bit of code called "GaseousGiganticus.c"
it is part of this
https://github.com/smcameron/space-nerds-in-space

this is a bit of C code to compile a fun tool

you can get something like this out of it


or this




other tools are also needed to convert the CUBE maped images to a simple cylindrical , but that is easy to do with the perl or python "pano-tools" that are part of hugin

they are in pip or cpan

[Francissimo]

Thanks for the comments and for sharing that tool, it seems cool. I usually use gradients in photoshop for gas giant but that seems more usefull.
Here's an update with some labels and another background.
space.jpg
here's also a space view of the station:
Digital Art - L'antre du cartographe - Mozilla Firefox.jpg

[Francissimo]

Now working on labels and icons:
EXPORT4.jpg

[ThomasR]

I love your experiments ! And seing the previous map (Earth +900 m above sea level) under the station was a perfect (not so) sci-fi setting

[ChickPea]

This is simply amazing! Fantastic work.