Leviathan Wakes
…is one of the Sci-Fi novels that brought me through long, dark winter nights. I really enjoyed reading the book and the main character Andromenda Mao. I always wanted to create my own fanart illustration in the way I imagined her to be. Consumed by an alien organism, surrounded by the virus like substances in her own spaceship environment. This is what I came up with.
This project would have been very hard to do without ZBrush 4R7, so thanks to Pixologic I could create this. The project was rendered in Keyshot with some final touches in Photoshop. I had to rely on Keyshot for this because of the size of the entire scene. The star like virus structure is made of 3 parts which are instanced and arrayed rotating around a center to create the repetitive almost fractal looking parametric design. This and the Mao model herself add a lot of Geometry. It is easy to set up in Keyshot but can become a hassle when exporting it all and assembling the scene in another application. GOZ might help but still it is a lot of work to set up the shading and lighting correctly. This requires more time which I currently not have.
However, after the introduction of ZBrush 4R7 I now know the limits of lighting quality of Keyshot. I am now even more convinced that Octane Render beats Keyshot in terms of lighting. I feel compelled rendering the scene again with a Octane lighting and shading system later this year. I feel the scene can benefit from this in terms of atmosphere and emotion to a larger degree. For now this has to make do.