Author's Note: THE SHIP
"...A sleep, sweet as Death... time traversed, and an incalculable distance... and then a splash of light emerged from the dark and the cold, its warming touch slowly explaining itself to me, showing suns and little worlds and great swirls of coloured gas and angry, roaring dust."
I felt inspired enough by this contest to try and depict 'The Ship' from Robert Reed's 'Marrow' series of Sci-Fi novels. The Ship is meant to be a strange, derelict, mysterious, planet-sized craft that is colonised by humans while passing through our galaxy. Over tens of thousands of years they explore it, settle it, and discover how to operate it's systems, machinery and great engines, and take on alien passengers. The book itself is epic in scale and well worth a read if you like that kind of science fiction.
Everything created from scratch with the exception of a rock texture and a photo of the moon (The Ship is meant to be scarred with huge craters picked up on it's journey. I've created a small WIP, but due to the number of layers and steps I had to reduce it's dimensions greatly (the full view is still a good healthy 2000 pixels wide).
I was greatly helped and inspired by a planet tutorial by Greg Martin, and by a couple of space-based tutorials in the past two issues of ImagineFX Magazine.
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