Into the Blue !

[pclavett]

Hi guys (and galls) ! The model does stay perfect when kept near the origin and positioning everything else is rather tedious and have been learning a lot about the cameras, the different views and how to be able to navigate in the Terragen World ! I removed the main planet and replaced it with another planet object as the second one has handles in the 3D view and the main one does not seem to have them ! I had problems with the rings and thanks to the forum got the solution for this ! Thanks again to all of you who helped ! Populating the rings was a bit taxing on the computer but did succeed in getting it done in reasonable time with the main rock being 1000M with the populator having the discretion of scaling from 0.2 (200M) to 2 (2000M) and the spacing varying from 8000M to 13000M. There are 2 distinct population, one being rock'ish and the other being ice'ish ! Did influence the disposition on the disk with lowering the value of the Y on both population so as to get a bit of thickness. Ring density was done with a projected target-like texture done in Filter Forge, with a separate camera to project it perfectly onto the disc. The background is a star texture that I developed in Filter Forge and still working on it ! There are 2 suns, the blue star in front mainly for show and the main one to the left in a position to light up the vessel and the planet ! The render was RT with details at 1 and AA at 9. The render took 24H at 6000px ! This was fun and again thanks for the help in solving the disc issue !

[Hannes]

Beautiful!!!! The ring is great!!!
Some suggestions: Maybe you could tilt the camera a bit and the ship to the other direction. At the moment everything is perfectly horizontal. A bit of irregularity might be more dynamic.
And I would reduce the brightness of the stars a lot. Make them a bit more subtle. That would probably give space more depth.

[mhaze]

Graet idea though! I always find someone on these forums says something thatunlocks the final picturefor me. Hannes advice is excellent .

[Dune]

A beauty, and indeed the rocks rock! For faster populating (and less memory use) it should be possible to use fake stones on the further areas, with an opacity mask by the same rocks through a default shader, and only populate on the fornt of the ring. But maybe that is more work than just populating.

For the stars you can also use a PF mask to let some shine on as bright as here, but dampen others by the greys and blacks of the PF, to get more depth/variety.

[Mahnmut]

Great start, always love ring planets.
Maybe putting the main sun a bit off to the side to add shadows to the ship and planet could give the scene another kick.
Best Regards,
J

[masonspappy]

The image is very well done.
I agree that  the ship might be moved/tilted slightly for a different view.

[pclavett]

Hi All ! Thanks for the comments and have worked on the weekend to make asteroid in Blender. One rocky, the other icy ! The previous image was using the internal rock objects and thought that Blender creations would fare better ! I established 4 population with the asteroids varying from 400M to 5000M. The populations were set with translations on Y up to 2KM to give some depth to the closeup view.... but only shows when very near. The ship was kept near origin to prevent the warping that seems to happen when getting too far away. All the cameras and other objects were disposed around the ship. Arranging it that way is tedious ! Changed the lighting from one render to the other ! The background was redone to be less packed with stars. BTW.... the creator of this model is Chris Kuhn and it was on BlenderSwap, as a free download at some point, but not anymore ! The Blender file was exported as a Wavefront OBJ but the materials did not follow very well. All the textures were redone with textures in Filter Forge, applied to UV exported images and worked in Photoshop so that the textures could be warped and transformed to fit the model ! That took me over a month..... many years ago ! I cherish this model now as a TGO in my model bank ! Have a good day all ! Paul

[Mahnmut]

Cool asteroid objects! Did you use the sculpt mode to make it?
and I like the variation in lighting.
Cant resist the joke again: in TG, warping happens when you get to far away, in TNG its the other way round...

[pclavett]

The asteroids were made with Blender and a series of modifiers with a procedural texture, translated to images and UV coordinates. Normals also exported and changed to heightmap with decent results. The asteroids are 10M and in my images, scaled by 100 times with the same scale applied to the displacements, to keep the look ! One of them is an icy texture and the other rocky. I will post them for sharing in the sharing section later tonight ! Take care all ! Paul