Rocket man, er...boy.

acecombs_b317c01b8d

This is a Dieselpunk piece rendered in Modo. The figures are Daz G8 and the set is the Abandoned Gas Station, modified to make it less modern. The rocket was built from scratch with some small details from Badking.au and the Prince Limousine asset. An SIBL provides the background.. The storyline is the beginning/end of a bad date involving a wealthy clueless heir and the beautiful, brilliant impoverished young woman whom he woos...poorly. They both attend a prestigious university, she having won a full scholarship, his parents having bought a few buildings. The story is fairly long (here's a link to the full post in my Daz Gallery) but here's an excerpt:

"The date was not going particularly well.

The evening had held such promise—Edgerton Dillmutton XIII’s Hamish-Lickspittle Assassin 42 (with the Jetro-rocket option) was fresh from Whizbang Spot Wash and its Skyline Blue paint gleamed—Dahlia had been delighted to see the name in script near the front. “Blue Dahlia. How sweet. Especially on an HLA42 with Retros. Verrry tight booster. on this strato.”
Edgerton felt a momentary pang—he was unused to conversing with women who knew about rockets and the like . Edge, himself, was not possessed of much in the way of mechanical aptitude. Well, none really, as he felt that service stations were unwelcome habitats, shunned by well-heeled men-about-town. Servants could wait in the grubby foyers while the slick machines of their bosses were being swarmed by besmudged men in overalls."

 

 

SixDs

Hey, Ace. Cool plane!

Here's a tip for uploading photos:

Upload them first as an attachment - they'll only show up as a thumbnail at the bottom of your post, but we'll deal with that next.

With your post and attachment uploaded and posted, click on the thumbnail of your image and that will open the full-size image in a separate tab. Copy the URL of the full-size image from the address bar.

Now go back to your post and click the little gear icon in the upper right corner and click on Edit.

Now click on the Image icon (little mountain and sun). In the resulting popup dialogue, past the URL of the full-size image in the upper box, then (this is the important part) adjust the image width to a maximum of 800, then accept. Your image will now appear at the end of your post and as a thumnail. Clicking on either will show the image full-size.

The distortion in the image with your post is caused by the image being compressed to accomodate the 800 pixel limit imposed by the forum software. It may sound like a bit of rigamarole, but once you do it a couple of times you'll find the method that I described to be relatively painless.

Hylas

^ actually, I wouldn't recommend uploading pictures as a forum attachment, unless it's really just a doodle/sketch/screenshot. The forum software reduces the quality of the picture. If you upload it in the gallery and hotlink to it, like the OP has done, you get no reduction in quality.

But you should manually specify that the width is 800px and the height will be proportionally adjusted automatically. So you don't get the distortion.

Anyway, nice picture! Love the retro vibe and old textures!

The lighting seems a little unrealistic though, the vehicle is to bright against the dusky background and looks a little pasted in.

acecombs_b317c01b8d

Hylas and SixDs, thanks for your suggestions (and the nice comments). I often forget to resize when I post, and it squeezes the picture. I'll pay more attention in the future.

Hylas, you're right--the lighting is a bit of a cheat.  wanted the background clouds in the scene, but to give it more pop I moved the distant light to the other side and added lighting to the building. I probably should have added some depth-of-field and had the volumetric lights cast more light around the scene.