Making of the cover
artist Josh herman shares how the Cover Characters – exclusively posed together for the first time – were made “We really wanted to show off some of Star Citizen’s alien races in the Banu, Vanduul and Xi’an,” says Cloud Imperium Games character art director Josh Herman. “These have been worked on for a long time and recently we have been updating them all as we get them ready for production. The older designs had good direction but needed more explorations and to be brought to a more resolved level.
“The Xi’an (front-right) are our most recent update, so we’re proud to be showing them off to all of our fans and look forward to getting them into the game soon.”
01 concept sculpts
We went with a 3D rendered image for this image, so we needed to make a couple of costumes to go along with the aliens. We started our block out with simple meshes that would represent the final costume.
02 composition tests and light test
After all the models were blocked out, we tried out some compositions that could work for a cover by taking unposed models rendered at different angles to figure out some posing and compositions that would work well with all three characters. We tried out the spacing by using an existing cover as a reference point.
Next, we roughly posed the models to match our concept and began to set up our initial lighting. We also like to block out the colours of our character costumes and skin tones at this point. It doesn’t have to be perfect on the first try, though, because it will be refined at every step of the process.
03 final Models
After the lighting was set up with our dynamic compositions and character positions in place, we finalised the sculpts of all three characters.
04 final Poses
After the models were all finalised we posed them all in the same scene so that we could get a final composition nailed. Here the characters were all placed underneath the same lighting and perspective. The scene size got larger here too, which can prove a problem sometimes but was worth it in the final result.
05 Passes
The final rendering was done in passes where materials could be adjusted and experimented with to see which combinations looked the best. Then, there was a touch-up pass where the final details were added in. Finally, elements such as smoke were added to make the final scene come alive.