Star Trek - Motion Picture Reimagined

[Harbinger]

Hi guys,

Recently, I thought of recreating the famous drydock scene from Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but with rustythe1's JJ-Enterprise - here's a couple of quick renders utilising the Star Trek: Nemesis drydock (minus the neck).

The drydock isn't quite to scale (I might make it a little bigger, or make the Enterprise slightly smaller), but I'm still messing around with composition and lighting. Any suggestions and comments would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[Nmajmani]

I like the pictures a lot, but I think that the second one might be improved if there were more light clearly falling on the registration number of the enterprise. If in an animation, this could be done using a cheat spot lit above the model, just for that shot. Otherwise, nice renders. Very TMP feeling.

[bmckain]

I have to agree on the second image but I really like the comp on that one.

[Jedi2016]

Neat idea, and really good renders to boot!

[Harbinger]

Thanks for the comments and suggestions.

Have just started to render a 500 frame test animation, and below is a high-resolution image of the first frame. Will post this once it's completed.

[Kionel]

I'm not a fan of the JJ-redesign, but these are terrific images. I really appreciate how you captured the look of the 2009 film. Well done.

[Harbinger]

As promised, here's the 500 frame animation - this only took a little over 11 hours to render at 640x480!

[Afalk]

Great job on the ship, dock, and esp. on the animation !

[Rigel]

The motion on the animation looks good. Too bad about the flickering. Did you use radiosity on it? If not, then I assume the flicker is the codec.

[Harbinger]

I'm pretty sure radiosity was disabled - the animation was rendered as an uncompressed AVI, then converted to DivX via TMPGENC Express. I might use Handbrake instead of TMPGENC next time.

[Harbinger]

Have started designing the full animation, this time at 1280x720 - below is a little taster of what to expect.

[Jedi2016]

The flickering seems to be a result of the specular texture.. looks like there's some kind of gritty texture there. I've only done stills with the ship, I hadn't noticed that issue.

[rustythe1]

yes, its the bump, i didnt get it quite right, the panels on the saucer are too deep and i did add some sort of crumple that has not worked well on the saucer section, i need to fix that, i have been learning more texture tips so will be coming back for a third go!
nice work with it though, maybe using the soft filter will get rid of some of it, or maybe lose the crumple layer in the bump?

[Harbinger]

Thanks rustythe1, I'll have a look at the textures. I'll also try using the soft filter, as you suggested.

[Harbinger]

OK, I've delved into the surface settings for 'HULL_SAUCER_SECTION', ' HULL_SAUCER_SECTION_2', 'HULL_SAUCER_SECTION_3', 'HULL_SAUCER_SECTION_4' and 'HULL_SAUCER_SECTION_LOWER'. There's two bump maps (crumple and turbulence). I've rendered four frames with them enabled/disabled.

From left to right, the original scene, crumple disabled, turbulence disabled, and crumple and turbulence disabled. It seems to me it's a combination of both that's causing the issue.

To be honest, I'd leave both enabled if I was rendering a static image (as it gives a nice film grain effect), and have them both disabled if rendering an animation.

[CAClark]

Originally Posted by Harbinger

OK, I've delved into the surface settings for 'HULL_SAUCER_SECTION', ' HULL_SAUCER_SECTION_2', 'HULL_SAUCER_SECTION_3', 'HULL_SAUCER_SECTION_4' and 'HULL_SAUCER_SECTION_LOWER'. There's two bump maps (crumple and turbulence). I've rendered four frames with them enabled/disabled.

From left to right, the original scene, crumple disabled, turbulence disabled, and crumple and turbulence disabled. It seems to me it's a combination of both that's causing the issue.

To be honest, I'd leave both enabled if I was rendering a static image (as it gives a nice film grain effect), and have them both disabled if rendering an animation.

Personally I don't think they add realism, though they do kill the plainness, and with that in mind, I don't see why you can't render them out as a flat texture to use as a map rather than having the procedurals. Of course if it's that 'noise' that is driving the renders up simply by AA required. For my money, it's too 'beaten' a look for panels that big, so I'd just loose them

Cheers!

[iczer]

Great Job!!

My only crits are, there is a noise like events going on at the rear of the nacelles, the blue glow area; looks like snow from a TV. And the warp out at the end, should be faster; almost like as soon as the nacelles glow in the back to warp should be like, glow... BOOM! no more ship. if that makes sense

[Jedi2016]

I usually add grain to my images in post anyway.

[rustythe1]

thats the only problem with bumps, they look ok when you are just setting up and doing stills, but then for animation it all goes to pot, dont know if you seen the wip thread but i found that if you go through and remove all the rflection values from all the surfaces the ship looks no different, but it renders about 10 times as fast!

[ccclarke]

A great start! I think adding background stars would add some more perspective to the renders.

CCC

[Harbinger]

If you look carefully, there are background stars. I originally planned to include Dean Scott's Earth as a background, but this greatly increased rendering time.

I've decided to render at 1280x720, but use a letterbox presentation - this should hopefully give a nice cinematic feel (should also reduce rendering times!)

[Jedi2016]

If you want Earth back there, try this: Figure out what the angle of the light is that the Earth would have, then render a standalone frame of the planet with that lighting on it. Maybe 1280x1280, with an alpha channel. Then apply that as a texture onto a single flat polygon behind the rest of the objects in the scene.

Remember that the actual object only has to be there if it's dynamic in some way, interacting with the other elements, receiving shadows, that sort of thing. Since none of that will happen in a shot like this, you can get away with a picture of the Earth in the background.

It's all about the cheats. As long as it looks like what you're after, that's all you have to worry about.

[Harbinger]

I won't be working on this for the next couple of days, as I'm currently beta-testing Star Wars: The Old Republic (the Lightwave rig is also my gaming rig).

Should be back on the project sometime on Monday...

[Harbinger]

Apologies for not posting sooner, but I started a new job shortly after the last post. Unfortunately, I'm now another unemployment statistic...

Anyway, since I now have a lot more free time, I've decided to return to the project. Below is a render of the shuttlebay, but with the shuttles replaced with TOS ones.

I'd love to do an animation, but this one frame took nearly 25 minutes to render!

[Rigel]

Originally Posted by Harbinger

Apologies for not posting sooner, but I started a new job shortly after the last post. Unfortunately, I'm now another unemployment statistic...

Anyway, since I now have a lot more free time, I've decided to return to the project. Below is a render of the shuttlebay, but with the shuttles replaced with TOS ones.

I'd love to do an animation, but this one frame took nearly 25 minutes to render!

That job didn't last long, did it? Sorry to hear you've joined our ranks.

Twenty five minutes to render the shuttlebay; I've seen render times like that on some scenes. For animation there are some cheats that might speed things up for you.

The main thing is probably the lighting. I don't what you've got in there or how many lights, or it's light by luminous panels and radiosity. Nothing will drive up render times like a lot of lights will.

A trick I've used to good effect is a globe of distant lights all aimed at the centre and each light set to 1% intensity, shadows off. This simulates radiosity without the render time for that and it can also provide some decent area lighting without a big render hit.

The spinning light trick is another way to reduce the number of lights in a scene and therefore, reduce your render hits.

A third method I've used is to set up a scene with all of the lights and then bake the lighting to a UV map. Just bake the lighting, not the colour or anything else. Then you apply that image to the luminous channel of the hangar bay, using the UV and by changing the luminosity percentage you can make the hanger brighter or darker. It creates the effect of having lots of lights in there while in fact you only have 1 light and it renders really fast.



That image is a cockpit shot from my cargo ship model. The scene takes at least 12 to 15 minutes with all of the lights in place. But that image was rendered using an image of the lighting baked to the UV and it rendered in about 2 minutes.

I hope some of that helps you overcome the render time problem and lets you pursue a shuttlebay animation.

Oh yeah, you need to change the names on those shuttles.

[Jason T]

Those are really tasty renders Harbinger! Lighting is lovely and works well with Rusty's model.
I really should release the V2 of the drydock: I fixed all the UV's on the dock arms and did a couple of other tweaks. They really stand out and make me cringe every time I see them.

[lonewriter]

Originally Posted by Jason T

Those are really tasty renders Harbinger! Lighting is lovely and works well with Rusty's model.
I really should release the V2 of the drydock: I fixed all the UV's on the dock arms and did a couple of other tweaks. They really stand out and make me cringe every time I see them.

I'd like that, I had problems with the lighting.

[Harbinger]

Here's a higher resolution image - I modified the textures on the shuttles, so although they still look alike, it doesn't look like I have 24 Galileo shuttles!

[Rigel]

Originally Posted by Harbinger

Here's a higher resolution image - I modified the textures on the shuttles, so although they still look alike, it doesn't look like I have 24 Galileo shuttles!

That looks better!

[rustythe1]

have you got lw 11, ive been working with a lot of my old scenes and managed to shave crazy amounts of time off renders, seems to work best with hard geometric models so this will be a good one to work with, i had a kitchen model that was taking 30 mins to render, i got that down to 1 min! if your camera is the only thing moving the cache radiosity now works very well, i render one image at high settings, then set the cache to locked and it never needs to calculate again, you just need to set it back to auto when you move something. also you dont have to have all the scene in view as it calculates the whole scene to add into reflections.