Category Archives: Lightwave

100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 11

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Eye_to_Eye_Klingon_creditsThis was an older scene that I wasn’t quite happy with on my first attempt. I replaced the Enterprise with my modified version, and altered the lighting. I added in some clouds from an old sky photo give the background some nebular depth. I designed it with the idea of a companion piece from the opposite angle in mind, so the idea is that there’s a blue nebula behind the Enterprise and a red one behind the Klingon ship. It might just make the lighting look incongruous, though.

I also had to run off another pass of stars to get them to show up (I really miss rendering in passes), and did some minor touch-up work in Photoshop in addition to my usual grain-and-bloom to patch over a rendering error on one of the Enterprise’s hull markings.

100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 10

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CDCR-010-Severed_Dreams_Zoom_credits

A quick-ish Babylon 5 shot. In direct defiance of my experiments a few days ago, the many fighters on-screen were not instances (I would’ve had more if they were), but were loaded in from a very old scene and hand-arranged. The trouble is, each model contained multiple objects and lights, which as far as I know doesn’t play nicely with instancing. I could’ve created single-object versions of them specifically to be instanced into large squadrons, but who has that kind of time? Not me, not anymore.

Perhaps when this is all over I’ll try to settle on to a one-render-a-week schedule so I can remain fresh while still allowing myself time to do other 3D stuff that doesn’t go directly on the screen. Not to say I regret doing this, I’m really happy about having so much new output to look at and build on (I’ve probably already exceeded the previous five years combined).

There’s another interesting thing I don’t have time to investigate. I tried to create a dolly-zoom effect so there’d be a lot of radial motion blur to create a feeling of acceleration, but it didn’t come out with any visible blur at all. I’m not sure why, but it’s something to put a pin in and revisit later on.

100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 9

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CDCR-009-CCS_Over_Halo

Video games!

I gave some thought to the question of whether or not to use non-fan models in the project… and in general, for that matter. Games are an excellent source, since it’s often possible to recover models and textures out of them. It may require some extra work to get them to look their best, but it’s often possible to get something acceptable without a lot of trial and error, assuming I’m able to extract them at all (which can be tricky, especially since a lot of modding tools are Windows-only and all are very, very homespun.). Continue reading →

100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 8

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CDCR-007-Early_Narn_Shot

While I was visiting home, I took the opportunity to look through some old copies of Starlog magazine from when I was a kid to find some paintings of the TOS-era Enterprise I remembered. It turned out I was looking for issue 195’s article on David Mattingly’s work, but while I was flipping through, I found one that hadn’t stuck in my mind, before. An article in the September ’92 issue, about a Sci-Fi TV series just entering production called Babylon 5. Judging by the article’s content and what I can figure of the production schedule based on the JMSNews archive, it looks like the article was put together in early summer at the latest; none of the actors are mentioned, some of the characters use their pitch-brochure names or titles (Jakarr, Vice-Commander Takashima), and most of the pictures are illustrations from the pitch document. However, there are three CGI test shots that look to be Foundation Imaging (or, at least, Ron Thornton) originals; a shot of the “Green Ship” transport, a ball-shaped ship that may have been inspired by the moon lander from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and a shot of two space cruisers near a planet. Continue reading →

100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 7

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CDCR-007-Pike_Over_Mountains

One full week!

I’m not sure there’s anything that’s done as much for sci-fi art as having people living full-time in orbit with a giant window and high-quality digital cameras. The background is from a photo by astronaut Tim Peake. The composition is inspired on an image of the Voyager by Mojo Lebowitz for the Ships of the Line calendar (which also was used as the cover of the novel “Full Circle”).

100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 6

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CDCR-006-Pike_at_Orion

As promised, another image from the days of Captain Pike. The background is a photo of the Orion Nebula I was pointed to by a blog post by the Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait.

I experimented with a variation of image-based lighting on this one. The only light source is the plane with the image of the nebula applied to it. I rendered it three times with the Photoshop render buffer export plug-in active, with the nebula set to different degrees of luminosity. I then mixed and matched passes from all three to get the final image to precisely control the look of the ship. The brightest version contributed the diffuse lighting, the medium version gave me the reflection and specularity, and the regular intensity supplied the nebula itself as it appears in the image.

While I was play with my post-processing, I experimented with a more intense, contrasty look than I usually go for, which reminded me of the original 1960s visual effects in Star Trek, and how the occasional astronomical background they used would look after being optically composited.

100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 4

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TMP_Beyond_Launch

One of the ideas I’ve jotted down for this project is “Crazy, Star Trek Beyond wide-angle, upside-downy stuff,” which I have a feeling is a well I may visit more than once. Yesterday, I ended up with a bit less time to work than I hoped, since I decided to pull some reference material off of a blu-ray for a possible future modeling project and that took up a chunk of my 3D-time. I went with something quick-and-dirty, but it ended up looking pretty good. Star Trek Beyond had a fun shot of the Enterprise launching from a space station where the camera was locked at the base of the ship’s neck, and we see the lights of dock blur into a Quanstquatti-esque kaleidoscope as the ship accelerates past them. Continue reading →

100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 3

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CDCR-003_Y-Wing_Theft

And now, my first tiny render.

It’s probably not a coincidence that with my rendering fewer images, I haven’t developed a feel for render times using Lightwave’s new(ish) quality options. So far, I’ve worked on these pictures in the evening, rendered them overnight, and done the post-processing the following day. I ended up completely whiffing on my set-up when I started running the final image. Too many motion blur passes, and I also decided to throw in some global illumination just to give it that “This model was shot with plenty of fill light” motion-control look. When I got up and saw the render was nowhere near finished, I canceled it, reduced the resolution, cut down on the MB passes, and replaced the GI with a wacky constellation of spinning distant lights (which I believe was put up for download by Kat Myers originally) so I could get this out in a couple of hours. Continue reading →

100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 2

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CDCR-002a_Terror_off

I had the idea for this image a while ago, not long after I finished my Puddle Jumper model. As I recall, I got the idea looking at the cover of The Terror, a historical novel by Dan Simmons describing the horrible fate of the Franklin Expedition as the crew succumbs to the harsh environment and also some sort of bear-monster. I think that part was a metaphor for how we’ll never know entirely what happened to those people.

Anyway, I more-or-less saw it in my minds eye as you see it above. Crashed Puddle Jumper buried in the snow, askew Stargate in the background, a set of lonely, filled tracks marching back. My premise for the image is that the ship tried flying through an older gate, unaware that it had fallen prey to the elements in the years since it was last used. The Jumper emerged at an odd angle, the left wing clipped the ground and sheared off as it was extending, and the rest of it plowed into the snow a short distance away. Continue reading →

100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 1

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CDRD-001_White_Stars_Over_Planet_Credits

There’s an idea I’ve heard about, the Mind Palace. It’s a sort of memory exercise, where you imagine a building— library, museum, palace, whatever— and sort stuff you know information you know into different rooms. You take advantage of your brain’s natural tendency to form associations by tricking it into joining certain information to these imaginary rooms, so imagining the room also calls up everything you’ve “stored” in there. I’ve never had the patience to try it out myself, but I thought of it earlier yesterday, when I decided to embark on this project, and I found myself able to begin conjuring up shots in my minds eye, just like I used to years ago, as if the ability was behind a door in my mind I just hadn’t opened up in a while. Maybe I didn’t “lose” my mojo so much as was driven away from it. Continue reading →