I think the word you’re looking for is Galacticooler!
Zort~!
Its all so so very very pretty. If it were a girl i would marry it. If it were a steak i would eat it. If it was a log i would use it in my fireplace. If it were anything else i would be ok with that too.
I would have replied earlier, but I was wiping drool from my keyboard. I hope we get to hear the story behind the scene we’re seeing. Uncle Sean, tell us a story!
Love the new artwork. Sean you’re awesome, but we already knew that.
I still think GWC should be a recursive acronym, short for GWC Water Cooler.
Well done Sean! Time to take one out of the archives to celebrate!
Out of curiosity, Sean, which software (or combinations of software) did you use?
Looks like the new album art for the podcast is finally propagating, too. Woot!
Yeah! It looked great on my iPod on the bus today.
Sean, terrific job on the artwork.
Might I suggest that you put a general, easy to find link to Amazon on the main page so that we can toss a few bucks to you guys whenever we buy something instead of just when you mention something specific?
Not good enough. May I suggest:
Galacticoolest!
Sean, the new artwork is AWESOME.
I don’t know why, but when I looked at the main page today, one of the infamous line dance songs popped into my head:
It’s ELECTRIC!!
Makes me wanna dance like a fraggle w/'talos! lol!
I’m also curious to know.
I’m loving the new look. There’s a lot more personality and pizazz with this new do, while the old one was more traditional looking.
And let’s face it, who could resist boobs, and an odd number of them at that?
Sure, I went for a 3d/comic type of vibe because I like that look, for some reason it fascinates me. It also blended well with our concept and I don’t often get a chance to take the gloves off – so to speak.
So the ships themselves we’re created and rendered in Bryce and all the skins and textures were created in Photoshop and imported into Bryce to lay over the wireframes where a bit of tweaking went on.
Then they were rendered using a ½ hemi lighting dome of my own design with low-radiance Omni lights to give them a little pop.
Then it was back into PS for lightning effects and a bit of tweaking to the plasma object in the middle of the ships as well as various other areas that create the ‘toonish’ effect. 
You modeled that in Bryce? With their CSG (mesh booleans)? Wow, not seen CSG used to that degree for a long time. That’s impressive. Is the lightning just lines painted in photoshop? I thought they were the curves feature most renderers provide for rendering hair/fur at first. That’d be awesome.
A minor crit, the lead yellow ship’s cockpit glass appears to have a simple lambert shader; it looks rather like plastic. You may want to tweak it.
How long have you been into 3d, btw? For this sort of work, you may want to look at mesh modelers (modo comes to mind, as does silo, for that matter zbrush3 might be perfect if you’re the sculpting type). subdivisionmodeling.com is an excellent site for learning how mesh modeling works. Heh, though for all I know you could already be an uber awesome modeler, and I’m just making myself look foolish
Joe
Pike, was that your personal Muppet avatar there at the end, being cranky but still participating??
Heh. Probably the closest analog, but I always identified with the Doozers.