snowspeeder

Built, lit & rendered in 3dsmax, composited & post-processed in photoshop.

I tend to overbuild the hell out of things, so this marked a significant advance in modeling only what I absolutely needed. Still, it took 88,000+ polys to get the detail necessary for the specular highlights and textures.

For final composition in photoshop I used 9 layers of varying specular spots and reflections to get the result I was after. The image is a little dark, but I wanted to balance the detail with the lights on the wings, so a subdued environment was necessary.

Created entirely on a Toshiba Satellite laptop (with external CRT, of course).

(Full-view a must for details!)

EDIT: I posted a sort of how-I-did-it process deviation of production test renders and the model I used for reference.

NOTE: DevART staff admonished me for the weird resolution on this one, and asked me to explain it here. I chose 1365x1024 so that users of both 1280x1024 and 1024x768 can use it (by resizing it themselves); if I'd just posted a 1280x1024 version, 1024 users would end up with a letter-boxed image because the aspect ratios of these resolutions are different.