[Half Life]

Here's an update -- I'm back on this project (part-time) and I wanted to do a render to get my bearings back as to where I am so far.

I'm still in the process of moving everything over to Maxwell Studio (so I can use HDR Light Studio) here and there are still some things that bother me -- among them are the yellow insignias and the guns at the front of the ship... both look a little cheesy to me and I'm thinking I will make some changes to their original designs.

Best,
Jason.

[Half Life]

OK, everything is in Maxwell studio and I have dropped the yellow insignia and changed the front guns (still not sure about them, but you can't see them here anyway) -- it's crazy, this is a 400mb+ MXS file and Studio handles it perfectly (with FIRE and HDR Light Studio running)... meanwhile trying to work on just parts of this model in SketchUp had me waiting for 10+ minutes just for a save.

Battlecruiser-Solaris_final1.jpg

From here it's just a matter of camera settings and lighting for various shots -- so this should be the fun part.

Best,
Jason.

[Aji Enrico]

Nice wip you got there.
I would love to see other ships, satellites, base/hangars/stations that can tell the story. Seems so lonely by itself in the big void.
...and a space MC Donalds Can't ever go wrong with having that in the future!

[Half Life]

Yeah, that's very true we need some other stuff in there eventually... although with a ship this size I'm sure they have a McDonalds or two inside

Image removed due to error.
After I sent this one to render I realized the 65 got flipped somewhere in the process and I'll need to go back and fix that -- also I'm still not sold on the front guns... for that matter why are there no front thrusters??? I mean there's thrusters on on every other side of this thing but nothing on the front

Best,
Jason.

[adman]

Has the look of the Millenium Falcon's big brother.
For me 'greeble 4' has it; stealth, scale and it looks like it is in space.
American football livery isn't a good fit. What type face is the '65'? it lets it down.

[Half Life]

Yeah a good friend of mine summed it up as "It looks like it ate the Millenium Falcon." -- I didn't see that when I downloaded the model but I can see it now. I guess I should reiterate that this is not my model, I got it from here: http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/ ... &scoring=m

I've done a fair amount of work changing the textures out for higher-resolution version made in Substance Designer, and based off of this Substance: http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/I ... /ID/561105

I've also tried to clean the geometry up for Maxwell and take care of some of the UV scaling issues created by typical SketchUp modeling techniques -- but this isn't really mine. The person who made this has struggled with creating renders of his models (in Kerkythea) and I thought it was a shame to not have some nice renders. Because of that I've tried to keep changes to a minimum, and the changes I have made I am considering undoing to keep the spirit of the original.

Here's the redo of the last render -- I fixed the flipping issue and rendered it to SL20 along with adding some SimuLens effects.

Battlecruiser-Solaris_final2.jpg

Best,
Jason.

[David Solito]

I like it. Good work.

[Half Life]

Thank-you David

I was trying for the look of the spaceships of the 70's/80's when they used real models (before CG) -- I'm not sure how successful I was in that, since this is at real world scale and the larger scale makes a big difference in how materials/lighting FX look... I'll try to get another one of these out in the next few days.

I'm not crazy about the quality of this Dosch Space HDR set I bought -- but there does not appear to be too many better HDR options for this genre... if anybody knows of some please let me know.

Best,
Jason.

[David Solito]

I know ther is a milkyway SIBL available there : http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive.html

[rusteberg]

I think you're wasting your time (and money) with the hdr setup. I don't see any purpose of a full ranged hdr for this. It's not providing any illumination value and any reflection/refraction you have to gain has a tendency to make the image feel flat..... which is what you don't want considering the "space" you are in.

If you are going for the "traditional" sci fi look and feel, I would consider mimicking that setup. In my opinion you'd be better off creating a backplate from existing universe/star image (there are tons out there at high res) and either converting it to mxi to use as raw background, or comp in behind alpha in post.... just some thoughts....

pop a star wars movie into the dvd player at home and pause it on a few of the star destroyer/death star shots and observe what makes that work.... i think you will find this little exercise very rewarding.

[Half Life]

I think you may be correct on those HDR -- I like the ambient lighting they provide but using them as the background reveals their many flaws... so a backplate may be the better way to go there. I'm going to continue to play with them if only because I did spend money on them and will find some way to get my moneys worth back out of them.

As far the a the "look" thing goes the difficulty here is the model is made to real world scale of 2.4 km long -- whereas the models you are talking about in Star Wars were about 1 m long... which means that really nothing works the same way (Lighting, Camera, or Materials). I could shrink it down, but I've been trying to find a middle ground.

More than that, I was never really sold on alot of those Star Wars shots as "realistic", everything seemed too well lit for deep space -- I found the Star Trek Movies to generally be more interesting and "realistic" in their lighting of models for cinematic mood... but obviously it was more of an aesthetic I was going for than matching any particular style or shot. I was just trying to avoid the Babylon 5, etc. overly CG look.

Best,
Jason.

[rusteberg]

I'm going to continue to play with them if only because I did spend money on them and will find some way to get my moneys worth back out of them.

I bought a hammer and found out I only needed to use the saw in the toolshed, but I'm just going to continue beating the shit out of this board with the hammer I bought instead of cutting it with the saw in the tool shed so that I can get my money's worth out of the hammer.....

[Half Life]

It's art -- you can usually find uses for things that previously appeared useless if you try hard enough... although that mentality seems to annoy you.

I'm going to lay it on the line for you here and maybe you will get it -- I do not follow you around into your threads and try to find things to pick at you about, yet you seem to feel the need to follow me around and do this to me. Now I'm not sure what your reasons are for doing this -- it could be any number of things really, however I will say I'm not interested in your advice or thoughts if you can only express yourself towards me in this manner.

I've left you alone -- you've been the one to come to me and try to instigate. I don't really think very highly of you, and I'm pretty sure you feel the same about me, so why don't we just leave each other alone?

Best,
Jason.

[Bubbaloo]

You guys should hug it out.

[itsallgoode9]

what lens length are you using? some of the shots look kinda toy like, as if you were using a short angle lens. I couldn't figure out if you were using a short lens length or if it was due to shape of the ship having long tapering angles in it. I think the most successful shot so far has been the shot from the front, showing the thin profile of your ship...although that still looks a bit toy scale. Maybe it's the size of the stars and the amount of glow on the stars that are making me feel this? I did a super quick Star Wars search to see if I could find a comparison image but all i was finding in the couple seconds search were video game screen shots. Maybe look into that.

Overall, your updates have been getting better in each one, so you're going in the right direction!