Didn't see this til now - my mistake. Those look really good! While he does have some other great stuff, I think that particular picture looks best for a really gritty-looking colony. (love that gritty feel.)

And maybe we'll see some colony content this month - if not with visuals, then at least with options and things to do on the surface - ship repairs, ship purchasing, etc.

Which reminds me. Am I the only one that thinks the current stations are far too small? They wouldn't house a single ship at the size we commonly see.

I saw this today and thought of this thread. I read "gorgeous" "render" "alien planets", and I thought: I know just the crowd for this!

Gorgeous renders look like alien planets or Minecraft worlds
In all seriousness, I don't know how relevant this is, but maybe with a few tweaks something like this could be used to depict colonies on the planet surface during landing sequence images.

Enjoy!

That reminds me of needle ice. I took this picture of it once:
really weird stuff.

Funny -- for me, the "gorgeous renders" don't look like planets. They look like parasitic growths on a asphalt highway. (The depth-of-field effect is for close-ups, not for big objects seen from very far away.)

The colors are interesting, though, and could inspire some plant life on othef worlds in LT that's very unlike our real-world Earth plants. I wouldn't object to that.

Flatfingers wrote:Funny -- for me, the "gorgeous renders" don't look like planets. They look like parasitic growths on a asphalt highway. (The depth-of-field effect is for close-ups, not for big objects seen from very far away.)

The colors are interesting, though, and could inspire some plant life on othef worlds in LT that's very unlike our real-world Earth plants. I wouldn't object to that.

They look the same to me. It first I thought they were fungi or something...

Yeah, I agree that these particular renders look more microscopic than anything, but the idea was more to take inspiration from other procedural-type images. I think with some minor modifications in presentation, they could easily fit on the surface of a planet. On second thought, more than cities, these make me want planets with a "crystalline" biome. Imagine a whole planet that looks like the fortress of solitude

I made this a while back in under five minutes... simple stuff. It's just really tall greebles. If you added a texture to them instead of just a material, then a few other minor details, it might look really good. The polycount was pretty low, too. Of course you'd probably want to tweak it more than that - the buildings look kind of tall/crowded. But at least it shows it's easy enough to procedurally generate city landscapes.

Talvieno wrote:I made this a while back in under five minutes... simple stuff. It's just really tall greebles. If you added a texture to them instead of just a material, then a few other minor details, it might look really good. The polycount was pretty low, too. Of course you'd probably want to tweak it more than that - the buildings look kind of tall/crowded. But at least it shows it's easy enough to procedurally generate city landscapes.

I love this! Greebles make everything better! Chances are, this is the type of stuff Josh would love. It not only re-uses greebling, but it applies it to something very novel for city landscapes.

In the same vein, did I already mention my (already 10+year old! had to work with hardware of that time) procedural city generator?

My ideal colony image would be a bit complex, and I wouldn't expect it anyways. However, colonies, as seen from space, should look something like this

A fiery explosion with pieces of shrapnel flung into space? I love it!

Talvieno wrote:A fiery explosion with pieces of shrapnel flung into space? I love it!

No, well, sortof. That is the launch of a space shuttle, as seen from the space station.

Hyperion wrote:That is the launch of a space shuttle, as seen from the space station.

"What's a space shuttle?" he asked, in tones of extreme irritation.

Hyperion wrote:My ideal colony image would be a bit complex, and I wouldn't expect it anyways. However, colonies, as seen from space, should look something like this

Spoiler:      SHOW

This has got to be one of the best images I've ever seen. That looks so freaking epic.

Hyperion wrote:

Talvieno wrote:A fiery explosion with pieces of shrapnel flung into space? I love it!

No, well, sortof. That is the launch of a space shuttle, as seen from the space station.

I know. I thought I'd make a joke... which apparently failed miserably.

For a game other than LT, I'd love it, but we don't have thruster smoke in LT, and I doubt we're going to be attaching large tanks of fuel to our ships to get them into space... cool as that would be.