We're often featuring Etherum on our covers in various forms and with smart little details here and there. But it has never played the frontman / star role until today. New ATH and rapidly growing network adoption definitely make this the right time for a full ETH cover.  Let's take a stroll around the parks of 'Ethopia' - the future city of Ether.

From the outset I had two routes to choose from. I could build the visual based on the ETH/BTC conflict as the ETH crowd shouts 'The flippening is near'. But  I took the  "praise only" approach instead, as I am not a maximalist and I'm not here to chose sides. 

Simple and Sweet. The cloud city is encapsulated in the ETH diamond logo shape, backlit by a pretty blue sky. I smashed the sketch very quickly, showed it to Red, and he instantly loved it.

After four weeks straight of illustration artworks, it seemed right about time to call on Cinema4D again. First I searched for a futuristic city kit and those from KitBash3d are just amazing. 

The biggest workload for this cover was to assembling the city and populating it with vegetation. First I used high-quality tree models, but after generating thousands of them I reached the limits of my rig's performance and Octane kept crashing!

I swapped the trees with primitive geometry to solve the crash problem while keeping essentially the same visual rendering. The heavy clouds are added to the utopia-like atmosphere of Ethopia.

The rendering itself took about 6.5 hours for a 5-sec output sequence. I further interpolated with DAIN-app advanced AI software to improve the framerate for smooth turning of the model. I think this cover played out nicely and makes a great tribute to even greater technology we all know and love!