skeletor: Thanks 
I like your wc entry. Very creative take on the topic. Master… me? 
I think you mean @ndy 
mystery00: Thanks dude
Jerri: Thanks! I’m using the world colors, which are light reddish orange but weren’t really strong enough. I had a world texture too and had the gradient horizon. I tried adding a plane with a cloud texture, but I didn’t have much time to mess with it so I kept it simple. You’re right, it could be brighter like in the real mars photos.
richardve: Good point 
I wanted a unifying element, but I know some people (myself partly included) might have taken it as a lame stylistic touch, so I figured I’d point that out Thanks for reminding me about the PNG format. I’ve been meaning to try it as I try to grapple with host space limitations and bandwidth considerations.
Scorpy: Thank you I think either Sonix should win for his brilliant entry or Jerri for his creative and comical approach to the topic. So many talented people here! I never enter to win the wc, just to get better at my blending and to have fun creating stuff along with some great people, so if I do get votes that would be a nice, but if not I won’t mind The real contest is with myself to do better than before and faster if possible.
basse: Thanks!! I wasn’t so sure about the third image because I wanted puffier/lower contrast particles and a little more motion blur, but maybe it does work well. I trust your judgement. You’re right about the second image, not so great. I had hopes of doing a super detailed one but had the Blossom project to finish, which I never really got to do yesterday. You have a good point about modelling for angles too, because early on I did that. Then when I got involved in the F1 competition I began a comprehensive approach, where I’d model details never to be seen in the final render yet were helpful to me in knowing they “were there” to help the overall concept feel convincing during the design phase, such as the driver, dashboard, and rear part of the vehicle. At one point someone told me not to model what wasn’t seen, so I realize every model and scene needs to be approached in its own context: sometimes the whole thing is necessary, or sometimes just the front or the part that faces the camera in a static render. I must say your models always look great and exude style and creativity from every angle though
thegameboy: Thank you I first added a Grid to the scene, then on it I used a combination of fractal subdivision, manual editing of vertices, random vertex selection (available in the current bfblender test binaries), along with light subsurface division. The materials are procedural and use I think seven texture channels with Nor activated and Color in some slightly affecting the overall look of the terrain. You can stack several procedural textures together in a material to obtain a more complex material that interacts with light and other objects (especially if radiosity is being used) in often interesting ways. It can take a lot of experimentation to get the exact look you want for a given material, but along the way towards finding that perfect material/texture you can also create materials for future projects by assigning the material/texture you like to a simple object, like a plane, and locate that to another layer. Then you can later append that material in a new project using File:Append and importing the material and/or texture (just make sure you give it a descriptive name so it’s easy to find in the future).
Thanks again to everyone who took a look at this. I appreciate your time and comments. Have a great week!
RobertT
