SciFi - Dust-off

[Jason T]

I was playing around with Sean's lovely Serenity model for a future compositing assignment for my students. I rendered a not-so quick test render and to my great suprise got an awesome image straight away. With a tiny bit of tweaking, it looks like this:



Boring techie stuff:
2 hour render in LightWave 11 on a watercooled 4ghz PC
Composite, Match-move and image manipulation in Nuke, After Effects & Photoshop.

[GrahamTG]

Very nice, the dust is very effective. Always good to see Serenity in action.

[Meurig]

I like it but I'm not sold on the lighting. The direction on Serenity looks more screen-right-y than the background. Also your highlights are far brighter than anything in the BG and even given the material differences that makes it look overlit.

Similarly there are no crunched blacks in the shadows on the background, but there are on the underside of Serenity's nose for example, making the levels look mismatched.

Last thing - and this one wouldn't be down to you - is that a poly error just beneath the solar panel? Looks like we're seeing straight through to sky on the other side.

[bmckain]

I like it Jason. On the possible poly error. I wonder if that might be the bug I uncovered with the perspective camera on the refit. If Sean built this pre-LW 9.5 or so it could be. The new cameras don't handle potential non-planer poly's the same way the old cameras did. I had to triple a bunch of poly's on the refit because of it.

[lonewriter]

This is a cool render. Makes me want to try a Serenity render. Not that mine would end up looking this good.

[Rigel]

I'm pretty sure this model was built pre-9.5.

The dust looks great Jason. Was that done with particles?

[Treybor]

I love the image. Nice to see the Serenity in use, but that darling was created with LW 5.5 and LW 7.0. -- back when I was still perfecting my modelling skills...

Still, I think it could be easily resolved by tripling the polys in that area. A lot of my old models had non-planar poly problems. It's something I've tried to fix in my later mods.

The lighting does kind of throw it off just a bit as Rhys pointed out, but overall it's a good image.

It would make a great Resorce Appreciation Pic. (hint hint)

[Jason T]

Originally Posted by Meurig

I like it but I'm not sold on the lighting. The direction on Serenity looks more screen-right-y than the background. Also your highlights are far brighter than anything in the BG and even given the material differences that makes it look overlit.

Similarly there are no crunched blacks in the shadows on the background, but there are on the underside of Serenity's nose for example, making the levels look mismatched.

Last thing - and this one wouldn't be down to you - is that a poly error just beneath the solar panel? Looks like we're seeing straight through to sky on the other side.

The lighting direction makes more sense when I flip the background plate, apparently!
The highlights are a lot more problematic: I really need to take a good look at the surface settings and see if I can get them under control along with a change in the lighting. I tried to sort out the underside of the nose but a fill light ended up generating too much fill, especially when added to the bounces generated by the GI. Again, I will take a look at the surface settings and see if I can do something with the diffuse maps.

Originally Posted by Rigel

The dust looks great Jason. Was that done with particles?

Yep, just good old-fashioned HV's in sprite mode. Nothing fancy. I must admit, the shadows running through the volumetrics was unexpected though.

Originally Posted by Treybor

I think it could be easily resolved by tripling the polys in that area. A lot of my old models had non-planar poly problems. It's something I've tried to fix in my later mods.

The lighting does kind of throw it off just a bit as Rhys pointed out, but overall it's a good image.

It would make a great Resorce Appreciation Pic. (hint hint)

Hint taken! I'm going to re-render the ship and sort the lighting out. The Non-planar issue isn't as bad as it was: I rebuilt and re-UV'ed the underside of the neck to sort it out, but it looks like I didn't get it all.
It's still a bloody cool model though.

[Matt]

Absolutely love it Jason... I was a late comer to the whole Firefly thing but loved the show, love this model and love the picture, despite whatever issues there are.

[CAClark]

Originally Posted by Meurig

I like it but I'm not sold on the lighting. The direction on Serenity looks more screen-right-y than the background. Also your highlights are far brighter than anything in the BG and even given the material differences that makes it look overlit.

Similarly there are no crunched blacks in the shadows on the background, but there are on the underside of Serenity's nose for example, making the levels look mismatched.

Last thing - and this one wouldn't be down to you - is that a poly error just beneath the solar panel? Looks like we're seeing straight through to sky on the other side.

I agree with everything except the crunchy blacks comment. the background is clearly way off distant, and atmospherics will dictate that the blacks will washout with the colour of the atmospheric haze. That said, I'd expect to see some up lighting from the ground adding a brown rustic hue to the shadowing. I guess the same end look, but more logical.

Nice render over all though.

Cheers!

[bmckain]

I thought this month would be a little easier since there hadn't been quite so many images to the finished art sections. Was I ever wrong, I had to boil it down to six and this was one of them. Congrats on the front-page slot!