Finalist on Fox Render Farm FGT3D competition with the theme ‘explorer’.
Modeled with Blender, rendered with Cycles, finishing with GIMP. For the environment I was thinking at first of making some kind of ruins of alien megastructures floating around, but couldn’t get it working so finally discarded it and went with the usual favourite setting of mothership with its escorts (in this case an exploration ship with the probes/satellites).
Nebula/gaseous background is combo from several Cycles renders with procedural textures mixed with some effects in GIMP. Tinkering with it already took almost a week by itself, btw.
Starship model :
Basic concept :
