Here's an attempt at recreating this Star-Wars feel... Used models graciously provided on SciFi3D. I initially had a reflective shader on the snow/ice layer, which looked great in my test renders, but I scrapped it after realising it would take two months to render a final version. C+C welcome.
Nice integration of the fighters. I haven't seen Star Wars in a loooong time, but somehow I imagined them being blacker :P. I think a little motion blur would have added a good feeling of movement to this scene, but it's still a good image.
Yes, I need to render several images with/without fighters and landscape and composite in Photoshop to get a good motion blur effect. I'd like to add glowing reactors too. That'll be the next step.
Quote from: bertrand on April 09, 2007, 07:54:47 AM
Yes, I need to render several images with/without fighters and landscape and composite in Photoshop to get a good motion blur effect. I'd like to add glowing reactors too. That'll be the next step.
nice image....if you add glowing reactors....please give me tutorial kinda thing so that I can use it to....I have a scene which could use these kinda details....thanx
and very nice image....
I kind of tried something along those lines here. Pretty unsophisticated but it kind of works. It's just a combination of a white spot and a very small lens flare effect on each reactor. Of course, it's only a trick, so it does not give you any reflection of illumination effect as you would normally have.
it looks good...but more color combination (maybe red in middle) would look more realistic and trail of the flame/smoke of course
I'll try to composite several shots and see what I get: the general render as above; a render without landscape with an alpha layer as background for the motion blur, and a shot of the crafts illuminated by a small sphere where the engine should be (with GI at about 6). Will post it asap.
This is just plain fun! The first picture looks real and would look even more real with some sort of visual clue that they're moving at the speed of Mach 3...
Here's another try. Three different renders were composited here for the engine glow, motion blur and main image. Lens flare and blending done in Photoshop. Blur not quite right though...
Great job on the engine glow! I still don't see much motion blur, but it's definitely made progress.
Practice makes perfect. Motion blur is so difficult in my estimation. Too much and the good image is ruined. Not enough and it seems like something's wrong with the image. I love this background; the terrain is nice.
dhavalmistry you can get them to glow using luminosity for the glow and a invisible light source. thats how i got my star trek shuttle warp cells glowing looked decent.
Yes, including another light source in the scene is how you get the reflections of the engine glow onto the wings and other parts of the craft. I guess in theory you could do that in the completed scene, but because of time I rendered just the crafts that way (deleted planet1) and then composited to two pics (the trick is to position the emitters correctly, which is kind of hard since you don't see the actual craft objects in the preview). For this scene I used two light blue spheres (size:0.7, emitting power 1000). The lense flare in post-prod just adds this sort of "combustion" feel.
I agree that the motion blur is a bit subtle. It's partly because it was added to another isolated render of the fighters (no emitters, no planet, just a sun) and then composited back into the scene as a separate layer and using a "lighten" blending option in photoshop. A better, but much more time-consuming option, would have been to render the crafts against an alpha channel to get full transparency and composite them onto the full landscape using a "normal" blending mode for the two layers and playing with opacity until it looks right. I couldn't be bothered to cut out the crafts manually though, so I went for "lighten", which basically gets rid of the black background in the isolated render and only copies the lighter parts of the pictures into the landscape image, hence the subtlety...
King_Tiger: Where can I see your Star Trek shuttle?
here
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=1126.0
Very nice! Seems like I've been reiterating your method without knowing about it...
oh man, so that's how you got the glow! Been trying to work it out for ages :P
Yep. Here's the "glow" layer. It's the raw file, not a very good render. It needed quite a bit of tweaking in Photoshop.
you should be able to get the affect without a glow mask...
I haven't figured out another way to get the reflection of the engine wrap realistically around the volume of the model so that it also casts shadows upon itself. But an easier way would certainly be welcome...
I'd be interested to see something like this with TG's motion blur, especially the relative blur on the landscape (assuming the camera's moving) and the objects. If the camera is moving at relatively the same speed as the other craft then you wouldn't expect to see much blur on them, and there should be a lot of blur on the near parts of the landscape.
Although I do have the deep version, I don't have the animation module, so can't do motion blur in TG. Could do it in photoshop. But you're right, if the camera is moving and following the crafts, you'd have motion blur everywhere else. But since the entire landscape would be out of focus (especially the foreground), I think it would kind of defeat the point of Terragen. I'll have a go in postprod, though, to see if it can be made subtle enough.