This is building on an initial human bee hive idea where the world is so over populated we need to create entirely new ways to live, people use the hive as a home, as transport, and as a way to keep everything under control.

Here are some more buildings I experimented with mental ray and all of its fantastic mia_materials and mia_materials_x and got some interesting results, I found this be following a tutorial which basically pointed out where to find the materials and then said have fun with them.

new idea

moved away partially from the Easter Island resource destruction idea, its still about that but more about obsession and consumerism, and the way we build gigantic buildings the way the rapa nui people built they're giant Moai heads.

pumpjack

started using bump mapping and playing about more with textures

its a cog powered pumpjack

Final piece, Earth Island

This piece is drawing attention to the similarities between the planet earth and Easter Island, the wastefulness of resources, obsession with statues or buildings (making them bigger and bigger), and wars over scarcity of resources, in Easter Islands case food in our case oil. I watched "Princess Monoke" by studio ghibli to give me ideas on composition.

Palm Tree and Crane

This is actually the second palm tree I made but I destroyed the original during the creation of this one by mistake I simply extruded and twisted a cube until I got a nice trunk shape stuck a texture on it and used automatic mapping, then made one leave textured it and duplicated it a dozen times.







The karakuri crane I made probably took about as long as my entire piece, and in the actual composition it is barely visible, I found that I really enjoyed working with cogs and mechanical things, the crane would function if it where real all of the cogs are aligned and when the handle turns the crane would turn aswell, this I made using the knowledge from the mechanical pieces along with my imagination.

Mountains

I followed this tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOYaLpSK4XY the guy who does them is really thorough and explains alot, I made the mountain by making a displacement map on photoshop and then converting it to geometry and playing about with a few of the settings like 'aplha is luminence' and then got these mountains:

Then I textured, scaled, and made a little scene using another plane and an ocean shader.