12th CG Boost Art Challenge for 3D Artists - Improve your 3D Skills!
For our 12th challenge, we received 168 submissions including all sorts of stunning Space Carrier designs.
Our jury had a good but also hard time judging all the great accepted submissions. Each judge voted for their own top 5 artworks. We also picked three random winners for the challenge raffle, see all the winners below.
Regrading the prizes, we will contact the winners during the next few days.
Congrats to the winners and honorable mentions, and a big THANK YOU to our sponsor and everyone for taking part!
Now scroll down to see the winners.
We’re congratulating Mateusz Szymoński for winning the first place!
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Artstation
“I always wanted to create a large spaceship in planet atmosphere setting and here it is!
Inspired by the designed of UEF faction vehicles from one of my favorite video games – Supreme Commander
To be honest, this is my first attempt to do something in Unreal Engine.
It took some time to learn the basics of its editor but it was absolutely worth it, since rendering features, especially height and atmospheric fog are absolutely amazing and you can have great results really quick.”
Created using Blender, Gaea, Substance Painter, Unreal Engine and Photoshop.
Zacharias Reinhardt: “The atmosphere and lighting here stands out to me. The color and wide landscape makes it feel like we’re on another planet, what fits the topic very well. On top of that we have an elegant looking ship design. Good job!”
Lukas Walzer: “Beautiful vehicle design and a very skilled use of colors in this image! The restricted dusty and golden tones create a very dense mood and atmosphere.”
Cedric Van der Kelen: “Very nice, the amount of detail, compositing, color use, overall just a wonderful piece. I would only tone down the DoF on the Characters, and bring their black levels a bit up, the characters are by far the most distracting part. The DoF is also not very consistent. The kid also seems more of a scaled down version of the human more than it looks like a kid. Very nice job!”
Gregory Smith: “The color choices immediately make this seem straight from a film shot – the carrier has a real weight of presence. The characters feel out of scale with the foreground, but the overall entry is very strong.”
Aidy Burrows: “An epic widescreen shot here! Good use of conveying the scale too, with the mountains in the distance. A very moody shot with simple color use.”
Chris Plush: “This looks straight out of a grim futuristic sci-fi movie. The texturing work on the ship is particularly cool with the matte and grunge look, which isn’t typical for this type of subject but definitely works. Great design overall, and very cinematic composition and presentation.”
Amina Khan: “It’s moody, yet it carries a theme. Extremely poignant and on the pulse. It’s a definite thumbs up render for me.”
Wybren van Keulen: “Mood, lighting, beautiful skies, a subtle but elegant space ship design with very nice shading – the vast landscape adding immense scale to the scene, and then the finishing touch the people, making you wonder what’s going on there. Brilliant!”
Christoph Werner: “It was really hard, to find the most epic picture. This is definitely one of the candidates.”
We’re congratulating Lino Thomas for winning the second place!
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Artstation
“This was another fun space project.
I wanted to create a deep space vehicle, which can enter the upper atmosphere of a large gas giant do to some proper science. An effective large shield was required. This shield drove the design of the ship and gave a nice tool to create an interesting composition.
I tried many different angles and learned that using always long focal lengths for space images is not always the most exiting composition foundation.This time i went super close to the subject and used a wide angle to open up to see more of the environment and make the scene more dynamic.
The aurora shader was also great fun to create.I did create one many, many years ago and was happy to give myself the challenge to create an even better one!
It was also not super straight forward to create a soft horizon for the gas giant, but i found a clever way to get one without using volumetrics.
In total the project took about two weeks, mostly worked a few hours after work on it each day.It was a long journey, as i did not have a clear idea at the beginning on how that image should look like and tried many different things.”
Created using Blender, Cycles and Gimp.
Lukas Walzer: “Perfectly captures the calm vastness of space with its very restricted color palette and generous composition. The aurora borealis gives an unusual poetic twist to the Sci-Fi topic.”
Chipp Walters: “A photoreal monochromatic color tone depicting a space cruiser overlooking the aurora borealis over the north pole on earth, make this the clear winner for me. Attention to scale and detail along with enough DOF and perspective combines with an asymmetrical composition to provide a visually wonderful submission.”
Darko Vucenik: “Design of the ship in this piece is very convincing, with it’s modules lined up in a manner very similar to modern satellites. Blue coronas and overall lighting give this image a mysterious atmosphere.”
Christoph Werner: “An epic visualisation. Could be from the Lost in Space series on Netflix.”
Ken Liang: “This image really stands out in terms of the overall finish. It’s on par with what you could see in many feature scifi films or documentaries. I love the lighting effects, the glow, and the flares that gives it a really cinematic space look. Well done!”
Julien Kaspar: “Love the rendering and the composition of the scene.Very pleasant to look at.”
We’re congratulating Khoi Pham Nguyen for receiving an honorable mention!
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Artstation
“The OSN Provincial – class Carrier was made after the idea of complimenting vertical ship shape. The ship was named “Provincial” as a signifier for the size of the ship, the Provincial was made mainly for trading & maintenance while also provide adequate enforcement around the sector.
The ship feature multiple docks with color coding for each dock for pilots to distinct between which docks to land (beside guidance from Carrier’s tower). Orange is the color of OSN, Green is for civilian docks, while Red is for enforcement. The ship feature multiple turrets & 3 enormous cannon which serve as a way to enforce orderly behavior to pilots, although they are rarely used.
The scene here take place in a giant gas planet with dense clouds of gases all around it. The scene shows few of Dragonfly cargo carrier ships leaving & entering the ship for maintenance and trade.
This shot only show the bottom half of the ship, the true size is much more significant (600 x 600 m) But since I discovered this challenge very late (about 15 days late) so I had only 6 days left to put together this enormous carrier.“
Created using Blender and Photoshop.
Julien Kaspar: “I really like how disorientating this looks. Really interesting scene.”
Marius Iatan: “A scene that could very well find its place in a game trailer or animation movie. Lots of details, good composition and a dynamic setting. Well done! 2. Rodrigo Oliveira. Nice render which hints at the Star Trek universe. Good level of detail on the craft/station.”
Chris Plush: “Super epic emergence from a cloudy nebula. The effects and clouds really make the piece, plus a commanding ship design with an intimidating entrance into the scene.”
Wybren van Keulen: “Wow! The dust cloud that this ship is emerging from strangely adds a weird sense of movement! It makes me want to see this picture animated. The color cast is moody, but let’s talk more about the volumetrics, they are brilliant!”
Amina Khan: “A space carrier or a camp in the desert? Whatever the case, I am thoroughly enjoying the velocity in the image!”
We’re congratulating Ben White for receiving an honorable mention!
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Artstation
“For this challenge I envisioned a very dirty, blue collar universe. Folks just trying to get by on the outer fringes of known space. This freight transport certainly isn’t the biggest vessel around, but it’s all this humble crew can afford, for now.
Think I averaged around 5 hours of sleep a night for the duration of the challenge, but there was still so much I wanted to do! The HardOps tool was invaluable for quickly adding detail to my models. Luckily, I was able to utilize arrays to make things appear more complicated than they actually are. Most of the textures were created procedurally in blender, mixed with color masks created in gimp, that were then projection mapped onto my meshes using different orientations and scales to add variation. Might’ve gone a tad too far with the graffiti, but I wanted to reinforce the idea that these guys probably don’t hang out in the friendliest of areas. I was really inspired by the series “The Expanse” for this one, had a lot of fun creating this.“
Created using Blender Cycles, Gimp and Inkscape.
Zacharias Reinhardt: “Fantastic ship design that fits the topic. I like the more realistic and industrial approach here. The choice of color and the nice background makes it a strong image.”
Julien Kaspar: “A lot of amazing detailed work. I’ve been tracing this image for a while.”
Cedric Van der Kelen: “Very nice piece! The composition, color choices and effects all compliment each other. The scale seems a bit inconsistent at places (the bridge makes it look like a huge ship, whilst the containers seem pretty small.) Also, the rings around the planet are a bit too clean in the foreground. Awesome work!”
Gregory Smith: “The carrier in this entry is excellent: interesting, original, and very highly detailed. The background I find a little too distracting to fully focus on the ship, however.”
Christoph Werner: “Very nice modeling details and a great scene composition.”
We’re congratulating Juan García for receiving an honorable mention!
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Artstation
“ZN-07 Last Mission
It is a distant future, where the threat of a new wave of massive giant kaiju attacks is imminent, science is looking for remnants of previous battles and it is necessary to transport the biological samples to the universal research headquarters, large and secure transport ships are required for this purpose.
Very interesting challenge, first I started to develop basic ship forms on a notebook and pencil a kind of mental kitbash, once I had it clear, I used moi3d for hard surface modeling, later I went to max to build the scene and kaiju skull , where a big rotary installation assigns the different missions to the carriers, I used a big sphere for the earth and placed the clouds with displacement maps, all the render including the fake distorting optics is generated in fstorm, i did an special LUT for color grading tune, at the end I only placed an overlay / flare in BM Fusion.
I really enjoyed this process, I’m an architect, this is the first ship I design at this scale.
RoBot “
Created using Moi 3D, 3ds Max, Fstorm Rende, Fusion
Julien Kaspar: “Really interesting idea with this one and stellar execution.”
Marius Iatan: “A clean render with an interesting twist. Nice work!”
Cedric Van der Kelen: “Very cool concept! The color uses are nice, and it has an inviting feel to it. Tone down the lens distortion and remove unnecessary edge objects. If you want the dock and/or astronaut to be part of your piece find a place in the composition for them, now they are distracting. Nice piece!”
Chris Plush: “Really awesome design here. Strapping bones to your spaceship is one of the more interesting ideas I’ve seen. There’s a lot of detail you don’t see at first too, so this was a fun image to explore.
Ken Liang: “This is a very nicely designed and detailed space carrier. Looking at this image, I can’t help but get a sense of mystery to what’s happening because the ship is carrying what seems to be a set of huge fossil bones. Were they on an excavation trip? What is even more intriguing, is that the subtle fish eye lens distortion near the corners, kind of made it look like I’m viewing the scene from an astronaut’s perspective inside a glass helmet. The other astronaut also looks like he’s coming towards me. What’s happening?! Was I ejected without a latch? Am I in danger? Am I helping with the docking? So many possibilities!”
