I decided to participate in Matte Paint's Challenge featuring a scifi theme. 

The task was to design and build upon one of the provdided RAW photo plates and 3D model. It was a joy to participate and learn some new things along the way.

This was the base photo plate I chose in the end. It offered a nice composition and atmosphere setting I could build upon. Before starting out though, I color corrected the photo and started to sketch on top of it.

I also did one sketch on top of another photo plate, but I still chose to work with the first one. It was somehow more atmospheric and offered some sort of challenge for the 3D modelling and concepting part.

After the initial sketch I went over to collecting photo material and more references. This small but useful mood board was also created in the mean time to give some more direction. A lot of inspiration came from Simon Stalenhags artworks, District 9 and Independence Day.

The final 3D model render and the passed I exported out of Octane can be found here.

The passes are really useful to add some more realism to the render and stuff like masking.

And now a small process gif :)

This is the final result as seen above. It was a lot of fun to me. I hope you enjoyed this breakdown as much as I did making the artwork. Thanks for watching!