There have always been rumors...high above the clouds...
But noone except the builders could have been there. At such a place, beyond the reach of poor man. Yet, once up there, one would be - suprised, probably. The sheer meticulousness, the cold efficiency, the overwhelming logical structure. No, there's nothing to see there...there's only the utter beauty of the machine itself, a feast for the senses, too much for a simple mind to take.
After seeing the wonders for myself, I could not remember anything...when I came to, I was here. But, there is one thing...one thing I shall not forget. It is the path leading to the place...

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So, I actually made it in time according to my own working plan
Just wanted to finish this in November and so I did...even though I did not show it to you - yet.

Yes, it is a "bigger" scene once again. A few points about it:

_° This is definitely not aimed at photorealism.

_° Clearly, someone will suggest to add some human figure in there, for scaling references and all that kind of stuff. To fill the stairway, to give it a raison d'etre. To make it more believable. Whatever.
However, I do think that it would add nothing to the composition as a whole. A human figure would - well, "humanize" (if such a word exists - it should say, make it more humane) the picture. Something that I do not wish. It is a place not suited for you and me and so it should be seen. The absence of humanity just gives it an even more dreamy yet cold feeling. At least in my opinion.

Besides, I just suck at human modeling...you would just laugh at the piece if I added a character

_° I know that I'm not good at drawing clouds and stars...doing it with a mouse is not really easy for someone who can't even do it with a brush. And to be frank, I did not want to spend weeks on brushing clouds...especially since my computer has already choked and produced some rather heavy lag sometimes. I should get some more RAM...

_° Now for the aspects I wanted to achieve and practice: as you can see, I had a lot of fun using lights. I wanted them to be lively, bright and colorful and made them a lot more prominent in PostPro.
Modeling wise it was a rather simple concept - I started out with three tubes and one plane. They make up the main shapes you're seeing now, all I did was to add some details and change their shapes a bit. Simple, really

_° For the people interested in the technical sides of the picture:
I rendered and worked with this at three times the resolution you're viewing here. Rendertime was about 6 hours and 30 minutes with Blender's internal Engine.
Total vertice count is 750,433.
I've used Ambient Occlusion as well as a sunlamp for simulating a faint moonlight, other lamps were added to cast shadows / highlights and to support the modeled main lights of the scene.
Materials are procedural mostly, with some image textures to enhance them.
This time I used some rather heavy PostPro, like color enhancements and several adjustments, but I also drew the clouds and brushed around to make a lot of changes to the lighting.



Ooookay, enough for now...hope you do enjoy it, even if it surely isn't my most awesome creation (at least I'd think so, I'm personally not that happy with the outcome...). I'd be glad to hear what you think and to get some feedback!!

EDIT: I'm sorry for the re-upload - nothing in the picture itself has changed but to me it seemed that there was a problem with the thumbnail, which should have been generated while uploading. However, I always got that blank dA picture and could not view it - therefore, I decided to try again.