Hi all. I've dabbled in space art on and off over the years, just joined to see what people are up to nowadays and how far behind I am , and maybe to learn something if I get the time to get back into it.

While I like the non-realistic stuff with the clouds and multi-coloured space, I'm really into realistic space art. I've got a planetary science and astrophysics background, so if anyone's got any questions about scientific realism (or want something critiqued for realism) then feel free to let me know. 

I have some of the material I've done on my website in the WWW button below. My site's been around in one form or another since early 1996, and AFAIK it was one of the first repositories for downloadable planetary maps to use as textures before David Seal at JPL and others came along and did a much better job .

I've used POVray a lot in the past, and dabble in Lightwave now. I also use Celestia to visualise the fictional planets and solar systems I make for the SFRPGs I play and write for. My main website is at http://www.evildrganymede.net/art/art_f.htm, but the bit.ly WWW link in my profile takes you to my public facebook photo album of 3D images that I've made which includes all the pictures on my website and many more, since I've updated a lot more often. (I would have used that as the link, but it seems the address is too long to fit in my profile, hence the bit.ly link instead).

My pics are nowhere near the level of awesome that most of the pics on this site are, but it's something . Anyway, I hope to hang around and look at amazing pictures and learn stuff here

Hi Dr Ganymede, Welcome to Solar Voyager

We'd love to see some of your artwork. I myself am mostly into the realistic side of space art, although i like to bend the rules sometimes  Personally i'd love to hear any critiques, realistic of otherwise, i love feedback.

Also I have to confess i've probably downloaded most of your planet maps at one time or another, i've had your site bookmarked for several years now I'm glad you decided to join, I'll probably pick you're brain (although i use 3dsmax for my planets, don't know POVray)

Huh. Well I knew someone must have been downloading those maps , nice to know they were useful. TBH I just keep them on my site for posterity, I think they've long since been surpassed by newer maps out there.

Is this site very active? I was looking around and it seems that only a couple of the boards have recent posts.

Also, what qualifies as "Space Art" - obviously rendered images of planets, stars and action shots of spaceships, but would custom-made planetary maps count as well? Or 3D models on their own? Would planets and systems (where I've created the orbits, and planetary textures) rendered in Celestia count?

Nice pictures on your website, BTW

The activity of the site comes and goes, lately it's been fairly quiet.

There has been more than one discussion here on 'what constitutes space art?' I don't think anyone has come up with a real rule for it though. For 3d models on their own, most people post them in the Work In Progress forum, and custom made planet maps would probably fit in there too. I think your custom made Celestia systems would probably work fine in the gallery.....but hey I've only been a moderator here for a week or so, so JanL or Klankster might now better

Hey there, welcome to SV! It'll be nice to have someone with your experience on here to give feedback. Like regulus, I've never worked with the programs you use so I wont be much help to you with those, sorry. I'm fairly new to all this anyway.

In the short time I've been doing this, I've usually stuck to more of the "sci-fi" area. I imagine things in my head and then draw them out. I really enjoy realistic art, it's probably my favorite type, but it's hard for me to make still.

Well again, glad to have you and look forward to seeing some art from you soon!

 

Well, that's mildly annoying... I wrote up a description and tried to post something to the "Space Art Gallery - Members" board, and it said "I don't have sufficient permission to do that" and I lost my post .

Not sure what I did wrong, I followed all the instructions...

EDG1 wrote: Well, that's mildly annoying... I wrote up a description and tried to post something to the "Space Art Gallery - Members" board, and it said "I don't have sufficient permission to do that" and I lost my post . Not sure what I did wrong, I followed all the instructions...

Welcome to Solar Voyager!

There's a 20-minute session timeout on our site -- If you take too long to compose a post, sometimes it will time out and generate that error when you try to post your message.  I have been looking into it to see what we can do to correct it -- In the meantime, before clicking on the "Post" button, select your entire message and copy it to your clipboard just in case you have the failure -- Then you can easily paste the message right back in and post it without problem.

Sorry for the trouble, I'll make a note to see if I can fix that today.

As for site traffic, as Regulus indicated, it comes and goes.  We have a LOT of visitors every day (average 1500), but most of them don't post -- they tend to visit our Member's Gallery and Tutorials section.

There are a lot of general artwork sites on the Web (such as DeviantArt) but we're strictly space art (scifi or science -- Doesn't matter) and always ad-free.

-Tom

Hm, well, I was editing the picture a bit while I was posting, so maybe I did take that long. 

But yeah, I'll copy the post before I click submit next time. I'll give it another go.

Also, I may have created another user account called "EDG_" before I made my current one - I'm not sure what happened, as I never got the activation emails for the first account. Not sure if you should just delete the EDG_ account if it's still there?

Right - I have now successfully posted my picture, it must have just timed out earlier . Thanks!

Also, I notice that links and editing are kinda messed up here (as seen in my post in the Tips and Tricks thread). When I post an external link of any appreciable length the forum software adds a space to the middle of it which breaks the link. And I can't get in there to correct it because when I go to edit the links they're kinda half-formatted.

What board software do you use here? It doesn't look like phpbb3 or vbulletin to me.