D-Day, Bradbury and Cloud City revisited

Well, the day is almost over, but it's worth mentioning anyhow: Happy D-Day! On June 6, 1944, the Allied forces launched the Normandy Invasion, which was a major turning point in the European theatre of World War II.

I heard the news today: Ray Bradbury passed away on Tuesday. One of my all-time favorite writers (of any genre), he will be sorely missed. Two of the earliest science fiction collections I read as a kid were R IS FOR ROCKET and S IS FOR SPACE. Later, I picked up THE ILLUSTRATED MAN and THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, which carried some of the same stories interspersed with some darker, more mature stories; nonetheless, those two juvenile collections that I borrowed several times from my elementary school library were, to me, the best Bradbury. All the stories were thrilling to a ten or eleven year old, and that all-important sense of wonder (which is missing in so much modern SF) prevailed throughout.

Okay, with that out of the way, I wanted to share a few pictures that I have scavenged off my nearly dead Toshiba notebook (the fan is going bad: it stops running at times and the computer overheats and shuts off). Hopefully, I'll have the computer fixed within the next week or two. In the meantime, here are a couple of new views of the Cloud City tutorial I worked when I was learning to use Bryce back in February.

 
Here is an earlier render. In the newer pictures, I played around with camera angles and lighting a lot more than I had at first.

I've been submitting artwork to the Illustrators of the Future Contest. They offer quarterly prizes as well as a grand prize and publication in the annual Writers of the Future anthology. So far, I haven't been among the winners(I've also been submitting stories to the Writers of the Future Contest). One of the pictures I submitted this quarter was produced by combining some elements of several CG renders I had done in DAZ3D and Bryce. The following is the shot I used as the background of said picture. I think it stands on its own pretty well.

As soon as I get the Toshiba running reliably again, I'll post some more stuff. Drawings and 3D renders. And maybe a story or a comic strip. Until then, keep both feet on the wheel!