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A FINDING
So... I was trying to organize a portfolio of ideas for this science fiction concept I have in the back of my mind for some time. It has to do with many of the things I have been reading and watching in space and science news lately. Things like "the dark forest", necrogalaxy, exoarcheology and alien civilizations. Sometimes i felt like I had a grasp on the concepts, but still, things were more or less "in the air", without a unifying theme. In other words... I was kinda stuck.
So I did what I do when I am stuck, I procrastinated. And I usually do that "organizing things". Ans that is how I "found" and started do "organize" my old RPG arts, concepts and stories. Things that I had not paid attention for a long time (lets not talk exact number of years or decades). Most of the pencil drawings were actually very damaged I decided to digitize then to better preserve (and procrastinate).
However, among those images I found this very rough sketch:
A small temple sketch I used to illustrate an old RPG adventure. Its is very rough, very faint and very damaged, but got my thinking cap going.
So I used the image as a reference and created a new, lineart version of it. I added some details like inflatable dones and patches that reflected a structure that has been inhabited and fixed for milenia in a very dificult environment.
The concept I had went like this: "There is this ancient structure in this very peripheric ice covered planet". It is in the solar system but very far. Maybe a captured planet from a previous flyby by one of the many stars that have been Sun´s neighbours in the past. And it was not any structure it was a repositary of knowledge. I named it preliminarly "The Library at Ninet".
Now I needed an Ice planet to start the landscape. Lucky us that we have a (real) one: Pluto.
I looked at the best photos we have and found a mountain spot that looked interesting (the small square).
Off course resolution was quite bad so I ended up with this very blurred image above.
Although the image had awful quality, with a bit of image processing it coube be used to prompt a image generator AI. It did not work well at fiorst, but with a bit of editing (specially in the upper white field) it eventually started generating things that made some sense. And so I ended up with a very interesting landcape.
Composing the background and the temple onde ended up with something like the image below. It is clear that some adjustments must be made to better blend the two parts. In particular on the overlaping of the mountain and the temple at the lower right side and some other parts that still needed painting.
Another thing I wanted was to make sure that part of the structure was inside the mountain so I added lights. I decided that the library was actually part o a much larger hub that included several structures most of then underground, so the temple was actuall the tio of the iceberg.
Adding track marks to the snow near the entrance and a few more details and I got the final image (by now).
Once the outside was clear, I could start thinking about how it was inside the hub. So I could make a few concepts about the imense domed section a deeply scavated cave that was so big that inside of it there was an entire abandoned city. Or something that resembled it. I could also imagine the ancient machines and constructions, specially the "towers". This allowed to create a series of internal spaces and even imagine the first to explore and make a tower work.
Inside space and the "Towers"
A view of the past
So a few things were stablished: the hub, the ancient origin of the hub and the library, the setting of the story and the mistery of the towers and their purpose. There was a lot to define still about the universe, the technology and other places.
But the temple was not the only image I found that was interesting. In the same stack of drawingsand writings, and for the same RPG story I found the image of person wearing an exosuit. I decided to use it also and it helped spawn a series of new ideas... And even the first character.
But this I will discuss a another post.
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