Category Archives: Write-Up

100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 100

Posted on by

cdcr-100-a_day_in_the_life_credits

Perhaps it’s appropriate that my final image would be an ambitious misfire. I’ve occasionally created accidental long-exposure-style images from time to time. I’ve wondered about doing a sci-fi long exposure since I saw one in the 2002 edition of the Ships of the Line calendar (which sadly doesn’t even have a thumbnail online I can link to). My big mistake was having it be a daylight image. The ships orbiting Babylon 5 are so underexposed you can hardly see them even if you know they’re supposed to be there. There were also some technical gambles I took with lens flares and antialiasing that didn’t pay off. I think the concept is worthy of a second attempt based on what I learned, though.

Continue reading →

100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 62

Posted on by

 

cdcr-062-bokeh_dalek_ana_credits

More adventures in bokeh today. All post-processed (who has the time to produce 3D-rendered depth of field on the daily? Though I am curious about how it might turn out for backgrounds and not just fun effects on small objects). In this case, I rendered each object seperately, and then applied different amounts of blur to each layer in Photoshop. It’s pretty effective, though probably not physically accurate, considering I eyeballed how out-of-focus each object should be.

I originally thought of setting the Daleks into my model-exhibiting cove, since the background would be out-of-focus anyway, but then I realized the Babylon 5 docking bay would be much more visually interesting, and barely recognizable as being from the wrong show considering the angle and the degree of blur on it. That was the right choice.

Edited 2016-10-09: I realized after posting this that I forgot to take anamorphic distortion into account when I blurred this image. I’ve replaced the top of the page with a corrected version. Here’s the first version.

100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 50

Posted on by

cdcr-050-hiding_a_starship_under_water_credits

An experiment inspired by Star Trek Into Darkness, and a recent conversation where I talked about my fake water reflection trick. I think I should avoid water until I have some tools to do it in a more modern way, rather than just a procedually-textured plane and old-style CG draw-distance fog. Sometimes the old ways aren’t classic, they’re just old.

As an aside, comics artist Lucy Bellwood has started shipping handsomely printed copies of her own hundred-days project, which was the direct inspiration for all of these pictures I’ve made over the past two and a half months, generally of boats that fly. If you like the boats that don’t fly, I’d check her out.