...would be something completely different from what I'm doing at the moment.
I had to do this one. I started with this point of view (it was actually upside down, and I rotated it literally right before the final render). I found that some parts of this magnificent ISS model by Chris Kuhn weren't detailed enough for close ups.
So I changed some things. The first thing I did was to replace the Soyuz solar panels by more detailed ones, which makes a big difference. Then I realized that the original half round things with this chrome cylinder in the middle were way too low poly, so I made some new ones. Thinking that I was done at this moment I took a look at the Leonardo module (the big bucket behind the astronaut), and thought that this needs a lot of work. First I tried to edit the existing one, but then I completely rebuilt this module (including this round thing with this Mercedes star in the middle) and also made a bumpmap for it.
There were some areas with simple boxes wrapped with some fabric on the station which looked a bit empty. On reference images you can see a lot of tiny little stuff, which would be quite tedious to exactly rebuild, so I cheated by kitbashing a Curiosity Mars rover model (Sketchfab), adding some cables made with extruded splines and putting this stuff, that looks like a lot of useful gadgets, to the places, where they look cool. Of course this is not authentic, but I don't care!!!
By the way, I found a way to make these kind of images look more like real NASA images (at least in my opinion). There is always some kind of a subtle glow. Of course TG has a glow effect, but I find it rather unusable, since you can't change it after the rendering process (right???), so if the settings aren't good you need to restart the whole render.
There are glow effects in photo editors, but I found a nice trick in the internet. I loaded the original image into Photoshop and duplicated this layer. I then used a gaussian blur filter with a value of 10 (for a Full HD image resolution). I changed the layer properties (I hope this is the right english term) to Soft Light, which creates a blurry overlay, which is way too intense, so I reduced the opacity of the blurred layer to 45% and increased the brightness of this layer. I like this effect, and since I'm addicted to chromatic aberration I put this on top.
Don't know yet, if this will be the last ISS image for now...
