I totally agree about the “weekend is busiest”-thing. Planned to tinker a bit with arduino and a waterpump for a greenhouse, together with my spouse. Biggest problem is we both suck at electrics.
Anyway, here’s my entry, it’s fully pure. First time skin material, too. But one never gets better if one never tries, does one?
Cycles render in 2.81 Alpha, 32 samples & AI denoising. 8x5 aspect ratio, Golden Sections composition. Things I did for this that I’ve never done before: fresnel atmosphere and masked cloud layer on a planet. Terraformed Mars created from a maps-included tutorial by Fictional Reality, screentext map made in Inkscape, postwork in GIMP. Mars’ magic square can be found in the Wikipedia article.
Was going to take a break from competitions and challenges for a while but figured what the heck. I might as well do something. I know it isn’t much of an original idea but it was all I could come up with.
Pure Entry Cycles 300 samples denoise and filmic used.
Non-competing. Cycles 256 samples + denoising, lighting with HDRI and sun lamps, procedural textures, effects and finishing done with GIMP. Altered the shape to be curvier than the reference.
We’re all doing this for fun (maybe fun plus something, like fun plus skills practice, but still). Some of us aren’t eligible to compete, some have anxiety issues about competing, some feel their skill levels are so high they’ll blow newer artists out of the water and they don’t wanna do that, etc – no reason to exclude anyone from the fun! So we don’t.
Hahaha yeah I might have dated myself posting that. Had to use a #2 pencil otherwise it might not read the card correctly. Similar to old style computer punch data cards just the pencil marks acted like the hole punches.
Pure entry. Everything made in Blender, only procedural textures.
I went for a more indirect type of magic, with a shaman that talks to spirits to know the future.
Here is a little story to go with the image:
I felt the bitter scent of magical herbs long before I arrived at the Shaman’s tent. Sitting at the mat behind her, I waited. She did not speak a word; it wasn’t necessary. Seeing my naming hanging next to those of the dead… One does not need to speak to the spirits to know this is a bad omen…
Technical reason : winner of previous challenge is not eligible to take part - provided that the winner decides the theme for the next one ( if I remember correctly there’s one case when the winner competed again as s/he chose not to select the theme - the moderator will decide the next theme then ).
Non-technical reason : I think @KickAir_8P already had them explained very well ( or in short : just wanna have fun ). CMIIW, but this maybe the only contest/challenge that has this unique category.
Speaking of the latter, we’ve been missing the legendary @RobertT for quite some time now …