Space Scene Effects Test - Comments?

A week's worth of rendering and re-rendering went into this, and I've finally gotten it the way I like it. It's not actually for anything; I'm not going to use it in a fanfilm or something else. Just for fun. And to hone my skills, I suppose.

ISD Effects Test

So, what do you think? Good? Bad? What needs improvement?

And in case you're wondering, the rendering, motion blur, and lens flares were done in 3d Studio Max, the compositing was done in After Effects, and the sound and credits were done in MediaStudioPro 6.0.

 

Pretty cool, but the Star Destroyer looks flat. I'm not sure in this case if that's because the model is low detail, the lighting is flat, or the compression is causing it. It seems to be a common problem with the Star Destroyer actually.

 

I'd just tell people what I always tell them... there are really good tutorials on lighting and animation at 3Dtotal, SFM, LWG, etc.

 

the only thing I would say is, enable glow off scene for the engine glows, they just seem to appear when the engine does, the glow should be visible off scene a little...

other than that...

Darksteps...

 

This better?

Star Destroyer

 

It would be better if you had more of an engine glow on the engines and less intensity on the ship.

 

The lighting setup looks as though it would work for a model of a miniature SD on somebodies desk or something, as they kind of look lightbulb-ish. Don't get me wrong, I like the lighting, it's just that the intensity is all wrong.

In SW the engine glows had a very volumetric, rotoscoped look to them. But if you're going more for realism and less for canon, I'd just make a nice glow.

Looks cool though.

-Matt

 

Ok, I tried using VRay's global illumination setting on the Star Destroyer render, and personally, I think it looks a hell of a lot better. So I did a few single frame test renders, and decided that everything looked good enough to render the entire scene. Big mistake. See, whenever I render the ISD with global illumination, I get a mess. The lighting is horribly erratic, and everything flickers constantly. I've even got shadows shifting from their normal positions to God-knows where. Needless to say, it looks like crap. Two days worth of crap.

So...anyone know how to fix this? Any settings on the renderer that I should be using or not using? Here's what the ISD looks like in a single frame.

GI ISD

 

I think that looks really good...

 

Frankly I have never used VRAY, but in Mental Ray the combination of GI + Motion is very difficult to get pro results from... the key is to render a 3 frame test of the motion for every adjustment and see when things start to look good. The real problem is, as you start to get better results your render times will go exponentially higher. You need to get the accuracy of the GI calculations as high as you can (w/o your rig chashing ofcourse)... so expect render times in the 10+ hours per frame... I personally have rendered a 30 sec scene of GI animation that took about 1 day per frame and that is on my Dual 2.0Ghz MP w/ 4G RAM.

As to the scene itself... I think it is looking a heckuvalot better now, but I think that the radiance of the ship is to high... it has lost the grayish color of the ship...

 

You were rendering for two-and-a-half years? Damn. Screwed.

 

I'm sure it was an exaggeration

-Matt

 

Would have been 300 days (12 fps X 30 sec @ 20 hours per frame) but of course I didn't render it all at my system (should have explained). I sent it out to a farm, took 12 days. It was for a conference kiosk... I'd put it online, but the NDA's still in effect.

 

Eh, I gave up with the global illumination. But I'm not giving up on the scene; regular lighting will still produce decent enough results. The previous link is updated again; tell me what needs to be done with this one, if anything.