Once again, thanks for visiting. The muse's holiday continues unabated. In the abscence of inspiration I continue to doodle in 3D. Due to some recent overime at work I was fortunate enough to be able to purchase a new Dell 2408WFP display.. so now I'm working widescreen @1920 x 1200. This required a new desktop background. Necessity will serve where inspiration lascks... so here we have the 'Sulaco' from Aliens, available free from Vanishing Point. She is rendered in Vue6i with a background created in POV-Ray and composited in Photoshop. I'm really pleased with the planet, which was done in entirely Vue from a short tutorial that appeared in 3DWorld #102. Basically you set up the default spectral atmosphere and take the camera up 10km on the Z axis. Add a cloud layer or two and *instant planet* The ground is textured with a material from Monsoons 'Outer Rim' Collection. The 'Sulaco' herself features the texture that came with the model, enhanced with some procedural shader work in Vue. Some 'Random Altitude' noise nodes are blended with the texture map and also pumped into the bump and specular channels to give that 'Sci-Fi panel' feel. To avoid utter blackness where she is in shadow, the ship is lit with some two dozen point lights and four spotlights, all placed to suggest a realistic self-illumination feel like they gave the Enterprise in the Star Trek movies. This was my first go at playing with the different lights in Vue and I was pretty pleased with them once I got the hang of placing them. The whole thing was rendered out with global illumination and high quality settings in about an hour on my quad core machine. The background stars and nebula were created in POV-ray with Chris Colefax's excellent 'galaxy' scripts and rendered out in several layers. These were all composited in photoshop with titles added in and a bit of color adjustment. Do try the fullsize view - this one is rather large and the detail is lost on the preview. I think it makes a nice desktop backgound :) As always your comments and constructive critique are most appreciated.