VIEW AT FULL SIZE!! A Sunday afternoon on Terra Prime, capitol of the Terran Protectorate and humanity's second home after the loss of Earth. I did this image for two reasons. First, I've been doing what I call "big and small" images. Basically, I realized that a lot of us CG artists will get stuck doing images of big things, like starships, planets, and the like...or small things, like people and devices. But we often avoid blending the two. So, in the last few of my sci-fi images, I've been doing just that. Not only does it give a sense of scale, but it gives a completeness to the images that is often missing. It "brings it home" for the viewer I think, if you have things of recognizable scale interacting or in frame with these fantastical starships and otherworldly devices and settings. The second reason is that I was watching the special features of the Star Trek (2009) special edition DVD and JJ Abrahms was talking about how they filmed the movie in anamorphic film because he didn't really like the sterile quality of digital cameras. Anamorphic film gives you all those horizontal flares with bright lighting. And, as Abrahms said, "everything is better with flares." So I've been fiddling with the flare settings built into Carrara. Lo and behold, it has a specific setting for emulating anamorphic lens flares. Enjoy, and let me know what you think.