Science fiction is my favourite genre of fiction. To me it's the diametric opposite of all those annoying 18th-century period dramas in which a bunch of rich people are obsessed with which lucky lady Mr Darcy is going to bed tonight, or whatever it is such things are concerned with. In hard sci-fi, the characters often play second fiddle to the settings : the worlds, the physics, the spaceships. Growing up, in particular I devoured Arthur C. Clarke, and later his acknowledged heir Stephen Baxter. In these pages you can find my renderings of some of these different universes.
2001 : A Short Odyssey : When I was learning Blender I decided it would be fun to model and animate stuff based on the novel of Kubrick's film, which contains a good deal of stuff that wasn't in the movie. My grandiose plan was to render all the missing sequences, with enough other material to link all the scenes together. Of course, this never came to pass, but it was a great learning experience. Here you can find all those bits I did manage to make.
Xeelee : Stephen Baxter's Xeelee sequence of novels is a proper hard epic sci-fi space opera. While not every novel is a hit, overall it's a tour de force, a magnificent, dark, glorious tale spanning the end of the Roman Empire to the untimely death of the Universe five million years hence. Here you can see the spaceships from this outlandish series that I managed to depict.
The War of the Worlds : In Cardiff, obviously. I love the H.G. Wells novel and the Jeff Wayne musical, but the Spielberg movie was so awful it gave me a fit of nerd rage. So I decided I do my own renderings, using the proper tripods but set in modern-day Cardiff because why not ?
Suicidal Adventure Land : Another learning project. What began as an experiment with the then-novel feature of soft shadows in Blender, through a simple lamp on a desk, evolved into a bizarre, massive stone edifice with Escher-inspired architecture, alien Vikings, and Darth Vader riding a chariot pulled by a stegosaurus in a race with a hut on hen's legs. Sci-fi ? Surrealism would be better, but I don't have anywhere else to put this. Unfinished.
Other : Collection of smaller projects, mostly very early and simple tests. Saved for posterity.