Rise and Fall of an Empire,

The story began when Zaroth Dirmond son of Karoth the Great at the age of twenty three years obtained the control of a small solar system which include nine habitable planets, he chose one of them to estabilish the first colony and made it his main place where he built his magnificent palace. He named the planet Aroth.

Young age:
In the first three hundred years the small colony raised to a waste city and the power of the young king become indiscutable.
At his fifth hunderd birthday Zaroth Dirmond ruled the entire system composed of nine habitable planets and twenty six satellites, moons and asteriods. The news from the rising power reached far away in the galaxy and the closer systems started to be afraid of the possible attack from the Arothians especially that everybody knew that he started to building a powerful fleet composed of twelve intergalactic battle ships.

Golden age:
The next two hundred years was full of victorious conquests all around the galaxy, Zaroth became now an expert of strategy and a great economic negociator. A lot of his conquests were without weapons and made at the basis of treaties between his growing empire and neutral planets. By this way his power rose without any loses.
At the age of twenty six hundred years the Emperor Karoth the Great died and the shadow of chaos covered the galaxy.

Dark age:
At the death of the emperor the galaxy become the theatre of the war between his three sons. A deadly race to obtain the trone of the Empire. Battles between space fleets composed of hundreds of spaceships ravaged millions of lives. After seven centuries of war Zaroth Dirmond the Terrible, Emperor of the galaxy died five years after obtaining the trone of the Empire.

- The pivotal moment -
The emperror near his last days of life looks back onto his life and seeks where the happened the moment when he loosed the control of the things... he sees now his palace, all in gold tones, magnificient, powerful... he looks back and see the first ages where he arrived on the planet, where all was cover by forests and only few buildings composed well with the trees... he looks forth and see war and destruction, his palace burining, forests ravaged by the fire.... where this pivotal moment arrived?

- And few words about the project and the final image -

What I learned:
_ devlopping huge concepts (devlopping a design for a whole civilisation, from ships to buildings...)
_ time managment for a such big and long project... by spending about 2 hours a day (excluding about 4 weeks when I was overworked and I did nothing) and last five days at "full time".
_ menaging huge scenes by organising and rendering all in layers
_ compositing & special effcts - I finally learn how to make nice explosions
_ creating starfields
_ and many many more...

Technical information:
_ final image size: 45,64x30cm at 300dpi (5390x3543pixels)
_ number of polygons: well... a block of five buildings have about 300 000 polygons, considering that there is about 100 of this blocks the polycount is awesome... adding to this about 5 millons polygons for the palace + megastructure...
_ project size (maps, objects, PSDfiles) on my HD: 4,7G - that fits exactly on a DVD
_ time spent on devlopping the project: considering that I don`t had many time I can say that in working on full time this kind of image can be done in three weeks... but this exludes some things like rethinking the concept many times.. slowely.. without pressure