Mare Melancholia by theSea
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Description
Alternate (and way too long) title: The Melancholy Seas of Methane Lie Cold and Still.
This started out as an imagining of the surface to Titan, Saturn's largest moon. But Titan is completely covered in clouds and you really couldn't get this kind of view. So I transported it to another solar system where the conditions are similar but the view is better :)
This also allowed me to get away from the red/orange atmosphere I had for Titan and move to a more conventional blue, which suited my crappy mood better.
Vue8i render. The terrain is an infinite procedural with the now familiar terrain fractal + constrained recursive filter to produce this eroded landscape.
I wandered the camera around the landscape until I found just the right view over the sea. That's one of the neat things about a vast procedural landscape - you can go with a nice 'found' location which can help things to look a little less contrived.
Materials for the landscape included a snow layer right at the shore, some layers of rock from Chipp Walters' "Terragen" collection, overlaid with a layer of sand on the flat areas. Finally I added another layer of snow on top and used the orientation constraint to make it appear on the shadowed sides of the hills, away from the sun.
Then I changed the color of the sand to more of a bluish white, as most of the surface 'soil' on a moon such as this is actually going to be dirty water ice.
The sea was done with Vue's 'Methane' preset. After trying several bump settings on the water I decided that dead still gave a strange and alien feeling to the environment. There is also a layer of 'foam' around the coast to suggest methane ice around the shore. Unlike water, methane freezes from the bottom up.
The ringed planet is an actual object in the scene, not a planet billboard, consisting of a sphere and a plane. The plane has an alpha map and a texture map created in Photoshop, and the sphere is textured with a quick gas giant texture I made.
You can find some excellent tutorials on creating planetary texture maps over at www.solarvoyager.com
I pulled the ringed planet waaaaay out into the scene and made it really big. Then I positioned it with the ring plane pointing towards the sun and rotated to show just a bit of the plane of the rings. This is actually how you would see it from the surface of one of the moons as their orbits are almost certain to be nearly co-planar with the orbits of the ring particles. Yes, I'm an astronomy nerd.
For the atmosphere, we went with the ever popular spectral atmosphere with global radiosity - takes a while, looks great. I pulled the sky densities and altitudes down and reduced the atmospheric perspective to 0.25 to denote a thin atmosphere, and added a strong layer of fog down low to give things some additional depth.
After trying and discarding several different cloud options I went with a 2D Cirrus layer from Dick (Eonite) Schnerzinger's 'Cloudscapes' pack. I pulled it back to make it really thin and wispy.
Finally I added a skosh of lensflare to the sun and set the shadowing to a not-too-soft 1 degree shadow. Final render was around ten hours on an overnight session.
In Photoshop I did some mild levels adjustment and added framing and title. I decided that a short Latin sounding title gave a more astronomical flare ("Mare Melancholia" = "Melancholy Sea" in Latin) than the longer bit of doggerel that had been running though my head while I was finishing the piece.
As always, I look forward to your comments and constructive critique - anything you could add that would serve as a basis of improvement would be most appreciated!
Comments (33)
jclP
nice landscape
necrophage
awesome sci-fi landscape!
arcas
Tranquil.... and cold! Yep - a smog free Titan :)
ragouc
Very good work and landscape.
Ailig68
Nice landscape, cool explanation as always, thanx!
JCD
A classic sci-fi panorama... I'm just waiting for a small landing craft to drop onto the flats at right :) Excellent work!
Rutra
Very good. I would have liked to see a slight hue of some other color added to that blue, to make it a little bit more alien, but that's strictly a personal taste. Anyway, since the planet seems to have methane (the lake), a slight greenish hue added to the blue in the atmosphere would have been probable in that planet. I think some occasional rock on the ground would help to "sell" the scene, in what regards realism. Nevertheless, I really like the image and its serenity. Very good work.
danway
Very nice!
texboy
most outstanding work! nothing beats the mystery moons of a gas giant!!
dragonmuse
Very informative on how you did this. Lovely scene and I think the title was a perfect choice.
Seaview123
Your Vue panoramas are really incredible! Thanks for the explanation of hhow you did it.
Hubert
Wonderful landscape!
kobaltkween
i personally prefer the simpler title you chose, but the first, more ornate title sounds like a classic science fiction story. i noticed the subtle lens flare, and appreciated how soft and unique you made it. i like the colors; i think they convey the mood you wanted really precisely. the stillness of the sea adds to the sense of the remote: nothing disturbs it. to me, it feels more realistically alien for the lack of common tropes. the incredibly large celestial body backing craggy formations and a body of liquid is such a common image type, that the ways you follow your own muse and the realistic details you add are essential to making the image unique. if this were water, i might say the edges of the basin were too abrupt, and there needed to be detail at the transition from lake to basin wall. and maybe more detail would make it look more realistic. but i don't look at landscapes enough to filter reality from what i expect, and i certainly don't know enough astronomy. it's altogether a good balance between artistically and technically driven.
anitalee
Excellent
ThomasMacCallum
superb, I especially like the non-water lake. Excellent POV and materials
mermaid
really like the colors you took for componing this fine render, the athmosphere too works very well for me and has the "thin" feeling and especially like your work on the planet far away. To me there are no rocks necessary as the terrain is well elaborated and very believable with really fine textures and materials. The overall composition and coloring to me is just excellent!
bebopdlx
Beautiful worl.
geirla
Wow. Excellent landscape! I really like the sky too, and the dead calm sea (I like the orignal title a bit better, but that's just my taste). From one astronomy nerd to another, great job!
SIGMAWORLD
Excellent image!
junilau
Magnifique paysage
PhilW
I love that your scenes are put together with such knowledge and attention to detail - and that it looks just stunning helps too!
Biffowitz
Awesome scene and atmosphere, this looks great!!
psyoshida
Beautifully done.
jakiblue
it's easy to see you're a sci fi nerd as well as an astronomy nerd. grin I really like the "cool" feel to this one - if i was actually on that planet i can imagine how it would feel (well, besides me probably dying due to lack of something to breathe?) :) Wonderful scene - framing just caps it off beautifully too. But no render time info? I always look forward to reading how a render took 6 days - gives me a sense of awe! Heh.
scifibabe
Outstanding scene. Love the landscaping. Excellent details - love the ringed planet in the sky. Really nice info too on this. Bravo!
castaneda
Powerful scifi.The pan and majestic view is awsome!
Panic912
Great atmosphere and mood!
kftate
Fantastic image and superb work!!
Cosme..D..Churruca
very well done.
TheBear005
Fantastic alien landscape!