Here's a posting of how I made my latest Space Mountain poster.

First, I made the backdrop. I took a single plane and put my favorite starfield (available in the freebie section at Renderosity) into the glow channel and rotated it into the orientation for the poster. I could have put it into the backdrop and rotated it there but I chose the plane method instead. Then I added a sphere and textured it with functions from EnhanceC Space 3D. The rings are also made using Enhance C Space 3D functions. I added my standard planetary atmoshperic haze thingamathinga (available in the freebie section at Renderosity) and rendered the backdrop. There is one distant light and no HDRI lighting (or ambient light).

Then I built the Space Mountain model and the Space Mountain text. There is a simple primary shape which is the base roof cone and the base of the foundation which was done in the spline modeler. There are also some simple spline objects which make up the "shelves" that are placed at the top, break between the top and bottom sections, the bottom rim, and the bottom walkway. The components on the structure surface are built using an exercise in duplication creativity. The lights along the surface, supporting spars, and components all around the edge are duplicated with proper re-orientations using groups and modification of hotpoints.

The second level of the building was a little different. I built a second cone for the second level in the spline modeler, pumped up the surface fidelity, converted it to a vertex object, and cut off the top using a boolean function. This produced a sliced cone which has the same angle all the way around but terminates on the slice from the boolean cut.

Then I used the same replicating technique for the bottom supporting spars and after I was done, I went back and moved each spar (using the univeral manipulator) so that the individual spars wouldn't poke out the top "shelf" contraption. It took some time (about 10 minutes) but not too much trouble. If you could see through the first level, you would see all those secend level spars sticking out all weird.

Then I modeled the spires and tower using spline objects and positioned them appropriately.

Then I added ships. As you can tell, some of them are Star Wars ships and others are of my creation. Now that Disney is all Star Wars, I thought some Star Wars ships would be appropriate.

The blue glowing light spires are discs which I stretched into long spires (as can be seen). They are 100% transparent with a color in the glow channel. There is a 2D radial gradient applied so that the glow setting falls off towards the edge (very simple but effective).

The letters were created in the spline modeler. I built each letter, then duplicated them and added a second edge to to the duplicate (and compounded it) to make the letter edges.

The atmospheric effect is done by using a plane which is set behind everything. The plane has a simple gradient of transparency and glow. The transparency is 0 at the bottom and 100 at the top. The glow is 100 at the bottom and 0 at the top. I attempted to do this in the original backdrop rendering but the atmospheric gradient became too banded when it is rendered the second time for the final. The image shown here is a jpg. A png format reduces the banding significantly.

For the final image, there is only one distant light, skylight (utilizing a color gradient which can't be seen due to the backdrop image), and indirect light. Obviously the light direction in the backdrop has no relationship to the light direction in the final render but that's art! Three point lighting could have been used here but I wanted the image to have deeper dark shadows and be "spacey".

Very nice, thanks for the tips.

Super. Nice job.

Thanks for the walk-through.

Great tutorial and an outstanding job. Thanks!

Great tips. Thank you. Can't wait to try them out. Going to get the freebie thingamabob now.

Awesome Kix! Thanks.

Glad it was helpful. This was a fun and easy modeling project but the composition was tough. Space Mountain is a short horizontal structure. Making a vertical poster took some trial and error.

Tip-o-the-hat to the Art Deco/Worlds Fair poster designers of the 20s and 30s.

MarkBremmer posted at 2:31PM Thu, 02 June 2016 - #4270240

Tip-o-the-hat to the Art Deco/Worlds Fair poster designers of the 20s and 30s.

I would say more like 50's and/or 60's Sci-Fi novels cover

Thanks for this tutos Kixum, really nice and usefull for all the Carrara'ist !

No problem!

thanks!

Cool! :)

The Millenium Falcon is a nice touch. Especially since they are now both owned by Disney.

and the Tie fighters and X-Wings ...