very nice concepts dude!! Rock on!!
Grand Space Opera 3D Entry: Mathias Verhasselt
JamesMK
#63
This will certainly be in a league of its own - the whale is a magnificent concept and design, with a healthy dose of Douglas Adams, and it’s really great to see such an articulate philosophical summary with regards to the implied storyline as well. Looking forward to further progress here ASAP 
DimitrisLiatsos
#64
Man …reading your thoughts on your concept and watching your images gives a almost mythical and somehow romantic thought…i really like the whale interpretation :love: :love: :love: . It all shows so much thought …this is one i am really following very close …i think there is much to learn through this …i am also, knowing your modeling skills, almost afraid to see how grand it will look in 3D. Man…why all you French guys kick a$$ in concept and design…i envy u(in a good way of course).
Keeping a close eye on you 
:bounce:
mv1
#65
Pufferfish, Virtuoso, Panupat, D-3, pBarrelas, JamesMK, DimitrisLiatsos : thanks a lot guys, your input is motivating!
Borro : thank you! Using the sun as the energy source ? I think no human can claim copyright on this idea…
taavi : thank you! I will definitely check Alastair Reynold’s books.
Mr Glass : thanks. actually I don’t really see the problem with that kind of propulsion… it is organic, but in a very advanced form… they stock solar energy in antimatter in the specific tissues on earth (don’t ask me how 
, but they have cells that do that) , and then they use antimatter reaction with gazes for propulsion… they also use a kind of “quantum crawling” (don’t really know what it is yet, but they sort of use the matrix of the universe and find some “lines of power” that we don’t yet know to ease their trip in space ) that is materialized by the things under and just after their main fins. It is all biological, but very evolved… and I agree that it is hard to give that feel in the design. That’s why I’m still thinking on that. (I don’t want to go the “easy” organic route… meaning tentacles, slimy things, etc… at this scale, life needs to be very organised and has not much freedom in forms, so it can’t really have the chaos that usually rings with “organic” )
TiTaNiuM sAMuRa: thanks for your suggestions. And yes colors are not really worked yet… I’m rather in a design/shapes phase than composition/colouring .
thanks again all. More sketches and designs to come, with all your suggestions in mind. I was lazy yesterday…
DimitrisLiatsos
#66
I hope u don’t mind suggesting …maybe u could adopt in your idea also some giant vessels in the shape of a Squib …mainly because of the dynamic shape of his body… :hmm: …just a small thought… :love:
pinnamraj
#68
ArtisticVisions
#70
I don’t know about that: there are all different variations to the term “epic”. If every entry was the same idea/theme, why hold the contest to begin with?
Personally, I think his concepts fit the Challenge nicely.
jonahhawk
#71
Hulloooo Mathias,
Your story is vast and indeed epic, one dealing with not only history but evolution, the ultimate history. The challenge in any single image is to tell the story to the unitiated, the inocent passer-by. There is a great deal of detail on a micro and macro scale. It will be interesting to see how you show those details and the growth and evolution over time, instead of a single captured moment in that evolution.
The whale is beautiful. When I think of natural propulsion I think of jellyfish or a squid spirting ink and darting away. there is no reason why a natural living vessal could not expell a continuous stream of matter (or antimatter) as a means of propulsion. Think “The Bugs” in Starship Troopers.
Really, if I were naked and floating in space and I… expelled gas, I would propel myself through space!! Given my the right diet, I bet I could reach great speeds!!
kepp up the good work!
Jonah
mv1
#72
DimitrisLiatsos : thanks again my friend. Yeah squids have interresting shapes… I don’t think they would fit this scale though… but thanks for your suggestions, they are always welcome!
austinkyo, pinnamraj, ArtisticVisions,jonahhawk : thanks for your input, much appreciated.
simoncvy : thanks, and you’re totally right… those are just design sketches, I have to concretize some quite abstract thoughts, I’m not working on the composition yet 
I’m confident in the epic feel my image will get in due time… I’m not hurrying
I’ll start working again tomorrow, so I’ll have less time to work on the challenge, but I’ll try to continue steadily.
WazaR
#73
Truly very interesting.
Your ideas on design show allot of thought. I believe that the reason your ideas are “working” has to do with the play of scale and perspective from what we would normally expect.
At larger and larger scales, the universe takes the form of ever simpler physical forms, in this case spheres. Only at smaller scales does the universe begins to break away from near perfect geometry (with the extreme being at the quantum level were the physical universe loses all sense of deterministic stability) and begins to bifiburcates into more complex and chaotic patterns, which in our scale are the kinds of things wed call clouds and mountains trees and whales. In your work in essence you seem to be running the universe backwards, and creating ever more complex forms at ever larger scales. This is refreshing and innovative.
On another level the idea of an organic existence at a macroscopic level plays on the concept that we are all part of one single living organism. I’m not sure if this is a strictly environmentalist work, but I can see some influence from that ideology.
As for the design itself, great work!
I am wondering if you have gotten any plans on how this will work out in a final composition, there are allot of elements and I’d like to see your idea for how perhaps you will get them to all tie together…
Either way great work or I truly appreciate the intellectual process behind this peace.
NicoDN
#74
I love your whale, Mat !
Concept isn’t new but could be very well used in the way you’re taking.
mv1
#75
WaZaR : thanks for your reply… and no, I don’t think that’s really environmentalist… not in Lovelock’s Gaia style. Here, the consciousness life and then, the whole earth gets, comes from the humans. And when I say “earth is an organism” I literally mean it, with vessels, tissues etc, not the environmentalist biosphere vision.
NicoDN : thank you. Yeah, whales have a shape that really seems to go well with space! actually I’m giving this head to that organism to have some familiar look in the design. Since there will be no humans there, it will be hard for the viewer to attach to something he knows.
Well not had much time to work on it since last designs. I’ve yet to find the good image that could have the “dramatic” view the Space Opera theme requires. I should figure a simple way to make understand the threat of entropy, but that’s not really easy :S .
In the meanwhile, here are some thoughts about the “whales” :
They actually don’t travel in space by propelling. Under their main fins and after, they have “tissues” that unfold the chaos of quantum void and weaves some kind of “wires” made of the fabric of the universe. After that they grip on those wires with the tissues in their tail and thrust themselves forward. That makes them move not very very fast, but has a very low energetic cost… it’s more a structural and informational heavy process.
In their relatively long travel between the gazeous planets and the earth the matter they have stocked matures into living things, they have like a big bee-hive structure inside, and some of the matter becomes other whales, and all kind of “animals” and basic living tissues that can be used after in the earth system. We’ll see some of those organisms playing around the city kind of structure they have on their back.
MROGER
#76
Interresting start, I follow your wip and I wait with lot of interest your final concept.
funkymunkey90
#77
0.0 wow…this is amazing your drawings and concepts are superb can’t wait to see more and how some of the models turn out
system
#78
Interesting story, interesting design and i can’t wait to see the composition.
A such idea is evident in fact but difficult to put in action, i like the way you take m@, keep it up it’s very nice for the moment :buttrock:
terraarc
#79
Really interesting story and wonderful composition!!
The same idea of evolution is eating my mind for quite a time, it seems really as the most obvious evolution step “immitate the nature” she know better, she has survived a loooong time, a lot longer than human!
Whale-ship looks gr8, maybe adding some plangton eating in the scene. Or even better big fish-ship eating small fish-ship nature rule visualization. Some personal thoughts :shrug:
Keep them coming our way!
WazaR
#80
I think you will find the following links help full
http://www.pendragonart.net/gallery.htm
http://www.marvelplace.20fr.com/images/the_quietude_of_quantum_worldwebsite.jpg
http://www.simiemaryles.com/sculpt/quantum3.jpg
It is nice to see a very well thought out concept expressed in an illustartion. Who said that sci-fi art had no soul??
Intersting thought on propulsion, I was wondering if you are planning on showing this whole propulsion/generation process in the final composition?
So this image will be devoid of “human” life, instead everything will be organic in nature, there will not be a line separating the living from the “non living”. This seems an intersting take on unification theory.
Looking forward to more work from you.
Buena Suerte amigo.