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Great model by Ansel Hsaio, which I rendered in Maxwell v1.0.

3hrs - Dual, Dual-Core Opteron 285



_Mike

shocked!

That's mental mate!

You know what's weird? It doesn't look like a giant ship; it looks like a 13-foot model, which is what it is. Even the original looks like a 13' foot model, but it still works on film. This model has been scaled up to "real-world" size, but still it's just a 13' foot model blown up really big. Somehow, you just can't escape it. I think it's because the detail on it is scaled for a 13' foot model... the smallest detail isn't as small as it'd need to be. Can't hide from Maxwell.

_Mike

Superb Mike! I agree with you about the "scale" feeling (btw, congrats for keeping such a critic/objective eye on your work, it's really hard!).

For the scale feeling, it might come from the glare (a bit too "blurry" on the right side perhaps), and the lightning (not very contrasty for 1 point lightning, and for me the top tower looks like it has slight blue SSS -I guess it's not the case but!.. ).

Anyway, it's a marvelous image as-is!

tokiop

Yeah, I'm actually re-doing the render now with slightly less power on some of the lights, which are casting scale-betraying throw. At "real world" scale, they'd be like 1 billion-Watt bulb arrays But also, I'm adjusting the key light a bit so you can't see falloff over the width of the hull.

Real outer space has no ambient fill, but spaceships in movies, like this ship, always do, because we shoot the models in studios. Even though stark "no ambient' lighting is physically accurate, it always looks wrong. Just one of those weird things. Like stars, which you can't actually expose for at the same time with the foreground subject.

But the real problem with the key lighting here is that it's not close enough to parallel light to properly say "sun". Maxwell can't do this properly yet. The key light is small, but has to be far away to cover the whole ship, and it's actually at the maximum light emission Maxwell will allow right now. I can't move it farther away and make it smaller without causing all kinds of exposure havoc with the other lights.

The other thing I can do is replace the shipboard lights with varied .mxi textures to break them up. I did this already, actually, and the rendertime exploded, so I disabled that. But that'll help a touch, too.

Tweaking continues...

_Mike

Wow, really really really great render, Dark Lord!!!!

wonderful!!!

I think your next one is Death Star.

Nice one Mike, I agree the scale illusion is related to lighting conditions.

Yeah, but not entirely... you can't get around the geometry problems:



...see here's with no glare, reduced shipboard lights and fixed keylight to act more like paralell light. It's a touch better, sure, but not the leaps and bounds it'd need to go to look enormous. As long as the geometry doesn't sell it, it'll never sell. That's my prediction. I'm going to follow it through, though...

(This is a 15 minute render, by the way...)

_Mike

Awesome! How many emitters?

2 keylight emitters, basically acting as one sunlight, and a diffuse fill light.

After that, there's like a billion shipboard emitters... I honestly don't know how many of them there are, and I sure wouldn't want to count.


_Mike

Another problem is the lack of a reference to compare the size with. Probably if this thing was real and you could take a picture of it you'll lose the scale too.

NICE!!

It would be nice, to have "sun" without "sky" for that kind of renders...

Yeah... this is why we're always flying flocks of birds past our stuff... but the whole idea bothers me. I think if it was really right - if it was really working - you wouldn't need those sorts of tricks.

Got a few more ideas, yet...

_Mike

Fantastic work mike.
But missing some dirt for me.
May be it goes at the starshipwash before the shot