Warhammer 30k: The Great Triumph After Ullanor
When I first started reading Warhammer novels, I was truly enamored by the inconceivable scale of things. The Great Triumph After Ullanor is an event that exemplifies that more than any other. Millions of human soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Space Marines amongst countless formations of vehicles and war machines; all gathered on a continent sized plain of polished and flattened stone as a far as the eye can see. All there to celebrate and commemorate one thing: the crowning of Horus Lupercal, the first found son of the Emperor, as Warmaster.
Upon reading the description of an entire mountain being scraped away and used to fill in the valleys and hills, creating a perfectly flat plain that stretched hundreds of miles, then polished to a marble like finish; I was totally blown away. Always a massive fan of science fiction, I had never encountered anything quite like this, or if I had it was always described as one of the greatest works of humanity. Here it was mentioned as if it was a task like any other, an easy achievement for The Imperium of Mankind. I thought, “If this was easy, imagine what else they can do.” In many ways this event is what really drew me fully into the world and ignited my now intense interest.
This painting became an inevitability, something personal to me that I knew I would eventually create no matter what. Partly for the importance of the event and partly to satisfy my own curiosity of what it might have looked like. I did a ton of research on numbers, scale, and layout. In the end I decided to build a massive 3D replica of the event so I could really see it with my own eyes. It was so much fun crafting models of all the vehicles and people, setting the scene, and building the stage. In the end when I finally rendered the scene I felt proud of what I had created.
I spent quite a lot of time turning that render into a proper artwork, as can be seen below in the process section. Ultimately I am quite happy with the grandiosity of the final product and the absolute scale of this scene. It’s exactly what I imagined: the sea of people and vehicles lapping up against the great dais, with the glowing figure of the Emperor Himself a beacon cutting through it all.
