Anttilat

I still haven't got around to study more "Essential Blender", but I did do one entry for blender-fi.org forum's weekly contest. The subject was "Hyperion (Dan Simmons)". I haven't read Simmons' books but I know that they are sci-fi and that Saturn has a moon called Hyperion. So I did this (click the picture to see a bigger version):

I actually did use "Essential Blender" while doing this. I sneak peeked what it says about materials and textures although I didn't study the subjects very carefully. Also I'm starting to forget what I have learned - I have to check from the book how to choose a loop for example! Hopefully I'll get some time to continue my Blender studies soon or I'll have to start over again.

This picture is quite nice in my opinion. The compositing was hard - it still looks like the moon is really close to the planet even though it's actually just close to the camera. But I like how the rings around Saturn let a little bit of light through (thanks Tuomo for helping with that!) and I'm quite satisfied with the textures. They were really simple to do with Blender. All in all I used about 1-1,5 hours with this image.

BTW, the moon Hyperion doesn't actually look like the moon in the picture at all, the real moon would be much harder to model (at least that's how it looks in Wikipedia article). But maybe I'm allowed some artistic freedom :P