[insomnia3d]

Mike that looks amazing... I think Mr.Lucas should consider the new Mverta Special edition DVD set.

[mverta]

Thanks, guys... yes, I know a ton of ways to create scale with reference objects, etc., but I really want to see how far I can get without that. Great suggestions all around, though!

_Mike

[redrngr]

Mike,

What if you took the stance that this spaceship's External Skin is an New high tech material and does not necessarily look like reflected metal. I understand about the size of the model that you mention. However, unless you reduce all that detail (If it truly was a enormous actual space ship then the scale of the external skin components would be reduced) the space ship looks less believable. My two cents anyway.

[redrngr]

I think LarsSon's suggestion is great! It puts the space ship in context, reduces all that detail and just makes the scene more believable!

[tokiop]

Mike,

the last one is no windowlight looks better for me... better contrast.. maybe a this distance and scale the board lights shouldn't be seen so bright? Or maybe be slightely colored?

Also, your material could be too much "diffuse":
in a house interior, it is normal to see the red bleeding of the carpet on the wall..
Here, it seems the main tower is quite a lot lit from the front, by the light diffusion comming from areas directly lit by the sun.
Maybe, because of the light loosing intensity with distance or because of it's scattering, diffuse light should be less visible (more contrast). At this scale, it might be difficult to adjust roughness and reflectance acurately because of the lack of mico-details.

Have you used almost perfect specular mirors or glass? it would be cool once animated to see the movement of sunlight reflected caustics on the ship (like a building's windows in he sun does on the building in front of it in the shadow).. Maybe for a closer view

Do you have any -ml images or movie for the ship? It would be very instructive!

Amazing image and still progressing! I hope we'll see your starwars version once released!

[b-kandor]

Kinda veering the topic but... Have a look at this. Excellent way of achieving the opposite effect - so can it be reversed?

[mverta]

Ah yes, I remember seeing this... in fact, I was looking for it back when I first put up the Masterclass thread about scale in the scene...

Well, the only way to "reverse" it, is to have the f-stop high enough that you basically don't get any DOF (the whole ship is within focus) and I've already done that. If you get noticeable DOF with the ship, it'll do what's happening in the picture.

I'm working on the lights now - surface lighting can say a lot about scale, as a couple of you have posted, but also it's common sense. After that, there's one more thing I could try in regards to materials, but past that, I'm stumped.

_Mike

[jfrancis]

If you turned off the lights because of what I said, I didn't mean to get rid of them, I just meant to limit their pools and throw.

When you're flying in to LA at night and you look down onto a street, you can see the street light pools don't meet or overlap, and it gets darkish between them. Some civil engineer must have calculated that that's enough light for safety, and that more would be a waste.

[mverta]

If you turned off the lights because of what I said, I didn't mean to get rid of them, I just meant to limit their pools and throw.

No, this was on my list of tests anyway, and it's not my intention to remove them, simply conducting a render without them to see what sort of role they're playing in the overall impression.

If turning them off altogether has very little impact on the render, then that says something. I'm doing tests now with more window-like mxi textures for the emitters, and their throw is now more appropriate.

_Mike

[lllab]

Mike,

iam no expert for this at all, but my feeling is than if one uses a tele lens things tend to look very small, this is seen very good in the examples above.
the all have very parallel perpective, this makes the colloseum look like a microstructure.

so at the reverse i would use much more distortion on the lens. i personally would play with the filmsize. a tele or macro lens has very parallel lines, a huge building or object needs a wide lens to fit on screen, it has very non parallel lines.

i am not sure, this is just when i deal with buildings and they should look huge i use strong perspective, no normal or tele.

some very, verybasic test with a simple cube:


film size 10/6mm:


film size 100/60mmm


but maybe this is only for buildings and i am wrong, just my thoughts.

cheers
stefan[/url]

[lebbeus]

This is a great exercise and can possibly have some impact on architectural scenes--showing the scale of a space without any reference objects.

Thanks Mike

Here's a link I recently came across

http://www.tevis.net/images/uploads/Spa ... nChart.jpg

I have no idea who created this reference image (click on it to zoom in), but its pretty cool

[mverta]

iam no expert for this at all, but my feeling is than if one uses a tele lens things tend to look very small, this is seen very good in the examples above.

The truth is, there's no hard and fast rule on this. Sometimes wide-angle lenses help, sometimes they hurt. There is a point at which wide-angle actually works against the scale.

In this case, not only am I replicating a lens used to film the model in the films, but using a long lens gives the psychological impression that you couldn't get very close to the object, because it's so massive. That may not make much common sense, but I've seen it work that way a lot in production. In any case, the wider the lens, the more this model starts to fall apart...

It's a great suggestion, though!

_Mike

[lllab]

i know it depends very much on many factors, also what effect you want to achiev.

but tele ANd looking big is a very hard job;-)

was just an idea....

cheers
stefan

[dungheap]

kudos to you for what you're trying to do. you've already proved the fact that it looks like a model.. and it is.. just like most of the scenes in the original movies. you could almost call it good on that fact alone and you're done. and if i might add... VERY WELL done. and it looks as you said JUST like the one in the movie. I'ts gonna be hard to pull it off without a reference. or an animation.


The best scene depicting scale on those things was in episode III when they fly across the surface of a starship and come up over the edge and in between them (very beginning) AWESOME!!! on the big screen. But this is a moving picture and not a physical model.

[mverta]

Back to the drawing board.

I was heading up a dead-end; I could feel it. I decided to re-re-revisit the materials. This time, instead of replicating the material from the actual model, I went for a more real-world metal.

I spent a few hours pouring over battleship reference photos, and built a base material that matches their reflective properties. Some battleships were extremely matte, and others were quite reflective. I went for a more-matte-than-reflective middle-ground.

My next move will be to create several variations of the material with slightly different paint colors and weathering, but think this is heading in the right direction:



_Mike