I just checked my Google analytics results for the month, and I discovered that by far the largest number of visitors to my site come from the Google Images search engine. For this month alone Google images has sent me hundreds of visitors.
Well it seems what I have to do is keep posting images, with nice interesting descriptive titles which make the role-playing game connection clear. It seems that it is probably a good idea to keep the blog updated with the different 
stages a finished 3D RPG image goes through, from mesh to render, to Photshop file, to the final jpeg with watermark and all the final touches added. It’s these touches (an antenna here, a gun turret there, done with vectors) that help the viewer suspend disbelief and allow themselves to be transported into a far-future sci-fi RPG fantasy world.
The Starhound spaceship for sci-fi RPGs in this image for example has been under development for a few days now. It is a spaceship illustration intended for science fiction role-playing games such as Traveller. The first stage for this illustration was a 3D mesh I created in Blender as an exercise. I’m still learning how to do things in the 3D graphics world of Blender and there seems to be a learning curve with no upper limit.
I then rendered four or five versions of the 3D spaceship mesh. These renders were nice looking, but still far from anything that could be used by game masters as inspiration for science fiction RPG games. So the next stage was to open Photoshop and add a backdrop of stars, then combine the four renders into one nice looking spaceship ready to have some detail added to it.
I combined the renders by first taking off the blue background blender adds with the background eraser tool. This usually turns the spaceship into a ghost but when I hit duplicate layer a couple of times the spaceship firmed back up again.
Then I position each render one on top of the other and started cutting away at the top one. For example with this spaceship illustration for RPGs I cut away almost the entire top layer (a completely yellow spaceship, see the render above), leaving only a pair of fetching go-faster yellow stripes along the side of the spaceship.
So I ended up with a nice spaceship and a nice background of stars (a royalty free image from NASA) but the spaceship was disappearing into the starscape, especially the half of the spaceship in shadow. As this is an illustration intended for use in a space opera role-playing game there was no need for it to look realistic, so I added a new layer between the spaceship and the background and placed a lurid green circular gradient effect there. Very easy to do in Photoshop, it’s just a couple of clicks. The spaceship was then picked out against the stars nicely. After that I put some bright blue vectors at the back of the spaceship and then smudged them to simulate the flare of a powerful set of antimatter spaceship engines.
The same technique of adding vectors and then smudging them works well for adding windows as well. I haven’t added to many windows to this spaceship as I intend it to be a sort of workhorse spaceship of the game universe, not a spaceliner.
I then added those few all-important details like inspection hatches, gun turrets, windows, antennas etc, and this science fiction spaceship illustration for roleplaying games is nearing completion.
