Posted on June 30, 2015

With the New Horizons probe quickly approaching its rendezvous with Pluto, I thought it might be fun to imagine just what it might find when it gets there.

I used to model all of my planets using Lightwave, but for this one I chose Vue d’Esprit because it has great options for adding a thin atmosphere and visible relief on the planet surface.

This piece isn’t intended to be 100% scientifically accurate, but rather a fanciful (and hopefully artistic) view of Pluto from its moon Charon.

I hope you enjoy it! I may do a second, strictly single-screen, render of this next because I designed the scene as a wide frame multiscreen first. It took nearly 2.5 days to render at 15360 x 2880 on Shadowfax!