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Well, for this year's competition I wanted to do something different from my usual archviz stuff. I've always liked sci-fi, and it came to my mind some classic 50's literature, I threw some sketches. I knew I wanted to test the new features of octane, as light passing thru materials using opacity. I thought, hey, how about if the whole scene is light by a moon, I mean an actual moon emitting light (well not actually physical correct, but almost). So I found a neat moon map I used as texture emmitter http://celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/s ... ator_id=10. Then I used Sculptris to model the whole scene and hand paint the masks for the materials. After riggin the alien and the girl in max I exported the whole thing to octane and the fun begun. Finally I've made used of macros and being able to pan around the node graph I've had tons of fun playing with the materials. Besides the steam maps (modified from some smoke images from http://cgtextures.com), the moon and the characters material mask the rest is done with procedural textures. Probably the one I've enjoyed and like more is the ice one.
When it was almost ready I thought I needed a nice background to go with it, so I started to browse around for an "alien" sky, NASA was the first stop and there I found this sweet photos by Mike Sidonio http://www.pbase.com/strongmanmike2002, check them out, it's more impresive than anything I might ever render, and the fun thing it's that is actually up there, we just have to look. He was really kind to let me use the ones I thought suited best my scene, so thanks Mike, if there is any good in my images it sure is the sky.
Well, I hope you like them, I sure had lots of fun with it. You can see the postprocessed images (minor color correction in some of them and a little bloom) in the contest thread, and here the original ones plus wips just converted to jpg.

now with the WIP images
BTW they were rendered at double the size but since I didn't want "teh internet" to blow I downsized for publishing, they were "cooked" for about 4hr each at 5000 samples. To make it easier to work with I used secondary mesh nodes with just each character and another one for the enviroment and moon.