Saturday, December 22, 2007

Docking Port

In the shadow of the artificial gravity toruses the four lander / ascent vehicles are docked. The smaller pods docked fore of the landers are maintenance pods which detach and manuver about the ship performing routine maintenance and repairs.

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Nebulae


AMG2 Publishing bought the rights to use this image on a book cover for one of Jean Marc Rivets sci fi novels, but to this day I still cannot find the book. I don't believe they ever used it.
Oh well, it's their money.
This is a Beam Core vessel with 4 auxilliary ion drives.
Modeled in Bryce with post in PS CS and Glitteratto.

Lander 5 Ascent


This is the lander / ascent vehicle used in both the ARAE Explorer and my other Beam Core ship from the Nebulae graphic. Modeled in Bryce. The rocket blast effects were created by applying volumetric textures to inverted cone primitives and toruses. The ultra high resolution used on the terrains made this the image with the highest polygon count I'd ever rendered. 8 million I think. 36 hour render.

Mu ARAE

Mu Arae is a potentially inhabitable planetary system about 50 light years away. It is a likely candidate for the NASA planet finder progam. The orbit of an Earth-like planet (with liquid water) around Mu Arae may be centered around 1.3 AU -- between the orbital distances of Earth and Mars in the Solar System -- with an orbital period around 1.31 years (478 days). The interstellar space craft shown in the 2 images below was modeled in Bryce 5.0 and was intended to emphasize the gargantuan fuel needs of an interstellar craft with a propulsion system even as efficient as an anti-matter system. This craft was modeled after the Beam Core Matter / Anti-matter Annihiliation concept. A system that, if it existed, would produce vast amounts of deadly radiation, and therefore would not be too practical for a prolonged manned flight.

ARAE. Beam Core Interstellar Explorer.

I'm big on dual, counter rotating artificial gravity toruses. There are 4 landing / ascent vehicles docked aft of the tori. These are the same landers shown in my "Lander 5 Ascent" image.
I wasn't overly fond of this model. These are the only 2 renders of this ship.