Test renders

It's a great feeling to get the modelling done and to start exploring what you can do with it. I dived straight in and used a free clouds and sky HDRI from Poly Haven. Following are some of those very first results.

Starchaser

My first poster concept was around the idea of "Starchaser" - Mondiale's ability to go faster than the Earth rotates and so catch the Sun (our star). This implies a scene where the viewer is looking at the back of Mondiale as it flies towards the Sun. The following is one of the first proof-of-concept renders.

I had several attempts at building my own clouds, buying in cloud models and creating Suns but none of them were giving me the look I wanted. So I went hunting for an appropriate HDRI and found one that was promising. Then I went through many iterations trying to get the HDRI set up with Mondiale in the right position.

The next task is to get the colours right. Printing always needs colours that are brighter, more saturated and lighter. I spent a long time in GIMP trying out all the options - with poster text too. Eventually I got to a scheme that looked good when printed out.

Finally the text itself. This is the "introductory" poster - simple with the purpose of introducing the aircraft. So I went with a basic design. I tried the groovy Mondiale font fill of the plan and layout posters but that didn't work in this context. I went with colours based on colours in the poster. The Mondiale Starchaser poster:

Rendezvous

I wanted the second poster to show off some unique aspect of Mondiale. In a static poster it is hard to convey a sense of what Mach 5 would look like. In the end I picked in-flight refueling. The concept is that half way through its trip around the world, Mondiale would have to throttle back to subsonic speeds to rendezvous with a tanker. That struck me as a unique operation for a passenger jetliner. Nobody does it because I guess it's an inherently risky manoeuvre. With that in mind I built a refueling drogue and put together another proof of concept.

I think that had promise, but it didn't really show Mondiale very well - that long droopy kind of nose thing. I re-compsed the scene, and brought in the same HDRI from the Starchaser poster. But I felt like I wanted to do more with this poster - add a bit more action to the piece. That idea morphed into including a second Mondiale, a side view, to show off its long lines. It struck me as quite cool that you get to meet a second Mondiale, high over the Pacific, as they both "take a break" to refuel.

I could have just added the poster text to that image, but I wanted to hint at the fact you were looking at Mondiale through a window - maybe from the tanker itself, maybe from a chase plane. So I added a dark grey rectangle to the top, representing something of the inside of the observer plane. That got me to Mondiale travel poster 2 - Mondiale Rendezvous.