Looking at Aengrod's technologies, we can find many similarities to ours. The people living in the dark areas of the planet don't care about aesthetics. Beauty and architectural innovations are negligible whereas reliability and functionality are of utmost importance.
Right now we are looking at the periphery of one of their big cities. These buildings are old but they are still in a good condition due to the vast knowledge of their creators. The machines are running and noone needs to look after them...

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One and a half month I spent on creating this image...and yet I can see a few major and minor things that still bug me. I won't mention them here but let me tell you, if I had the motivation to do it, I could work another month on this one. But as I've said, I'm already sick of seeing this and I want to show it to you now, even if it's probably not as perfect as it could be.
Everything started before my final exams in June, when I finally had a concept for a new work. It started out pretty nice but soon I realized that my ideas weren't good enough. But as I had to revise a lot for school, I wasn't able to be very creative and think about the concept a lot. Therefore a lot of work was necessary to finish this one up.
But for now (and I'm almost sure that I won't touch this anymore, at least not in the near future) I'm satisfied with the outcome - in the end, everything looks so much better than it did before.

A few technical stats - like during the model process of Machinae I had big problems with actually modelling this scene as everything went sooo slow...this time this scene contains more than 5000 objects....which is simply too much for my PC. Rendering wasn't that critical this time as I splitted it in several renders and composited them afterwards. But still, it took quite some time...
I also tried to work at a much bigger resolution this time - the original size of this is 3000 x 4500 so I guess I have suceeded.

Anyway, enough talking, I certainly hope that you can enjoy it, too!

Update: I have uploaded a new version with very minor fixes and changes (especially on the planes). Nothing major so sorry for uploading it twice.