In this walk-through, Andrei Sidorov takes us through the background of his environment,The World of Fog. He explains the colonization of Venus and creates the scene from composition, modeling and finally textures. 

Idea

My inspiration was a documentary about a possible scenario of the colonization on Venus. There are very high pressures and temperatures on the surface plus the toxic clouds are everywhere so the humanity will need to develop only in the upper layers of the atmosphere. In this film people constructed platforms that were supported by the cigare-shaped tanks with changeable shape – they can increase or reduce its volume. Tanks on its use with individuals have vertical shape, not horizontal as we accustomed to seeing on the airships.

Then I decided that it will be interesting to imagine such a situation on the Earth. People are forced to leave the surface and live on the hastily constructed platforms. They go down only to get some materials and had adapted to a new world no matter what.

Ratio

I thought: "This image must be epic"! I don't need to reinvent the wheel so I picked the cinematographic wide screen ratio for the composition: 2,55:1. The conditions of the competition were to make 2048 on the longer side so I made 2048x803 picture.

Composition

In the composition I planned three main "characters":

1. A big mothership

2. A group of the satellite ships

3. A recognizable monument of architecture

Also I like the rotated horizon, it gives more dynamic feeling.

The first sketch-

Then I worked on the silhouettes a little bit more and added simple textures on the background to bring more atmosphere and mood.

Also I started to think about how the humanity will be interacting with the new environments and added some cables, ropes and connections to the rocks.

Further I didn't change the landscape. I moved the ships and after some inner family discussion (my wife is an artist too), I changed the silhouettes, tone and the position of some things, here:

Modeling

From the beginning I decided to model my constructions in VR. We bought Oculus a long time ago but I had no time to test it.

I prepared my reference silhouettes:

Then planned to learn how to do the stuff in VR and make a rough model in one day.

I heard a lot about Gravity sketch from my wife, Lina Sidorova, she was excited by this program.

I thought :"Piece of cake!" I just need to watch a couple of tutorials, make several unfortunate attempts and I'll understand it all. Everything was fine except one thing. I didn't find the axis snapping and my construction had no parallel surfaces and lines. It can go unnoticed if you have a couple of cubes, but in the big amount of geometry this chaos made me mad.

Desperate, I tried to use more primitive program Blocks. And it saved me! It can move things with fixed step, it has snapping and it's very simple. I did all objects in two hours. I was so hurry that I forgot to download reference sheet in it and sculpted the objects from memory.

I placed the objects in the right order in Keyshot and dropped the sky photo on the background.

Textures

I combined the rendered image with my Photoshop sketch.

Added some air perspective on them.

The sky and clouds are from the one photo.

Mountains:

All floating constructions:

Here's how it looked like after rough Matte Painting.

Final

Then I gradually combined textures with brushes, gradients fog and light

P.S. Thanks to my wife for several wise advices in the process and for the translation of this article. All claims against her. It was perfect in russian.