This feels like one of those renders that every Babylon 5 3D fan-artist has made, but I don’t think I ever have. Or if I did, it was in the Ray Dream Studio days.
Category Archives: Write-Up
100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 50
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.
100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 49
100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 46
This image is based on a painting by Andrew Probert, depicting the launch of the Enterprise-D.
100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 45
An effect I wanted to try out is something called a “split diopter,” which is basically a sort of camera bifocal, for when you want two (or more) subjects at different distances to be in focus.
100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 44
Another quicky (well, not that quicky; I did have to do some rejiggering of the textures on the Blue Star to get it look right).
100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 42
I had a feeling that this Star Destroyer might be happier in linear color system. It looks like I was right. Unfortunately, it wasn’t particularly happy with rendering at a higher resolution, though.
100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 41
I revisited one of the passes I did for my 50th Anniversary picture to better get to know linear lighting. It mixes and builds differently, so I readjusted all of the intensities of the scene lights (and then further played with the contrast in Photoshop to get some of the drama back). I’m going to have to practice a lot more to get things down. Surface settings also react differently. That’s most apparent on the inboard grill of the warp engine, where you can see the blue glow reflecting from its twin on the other side of the ship.
100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 40
At the urging of Rhys over at Foundation3D, yesterday I finally figured out how to adapt my workflow to use linear color.
There are many explanations on-line for what a linear workflow entails. It’s fairly technical, but the upshot is that computers have to mess with images to get them to look right. That’s great, except when you process those images, say by using them as texture maps in a 3D rendering calculation. All of the renderer’s math is thrown off, because it’s using source data that was filtered for display, and things come out looking wrong. Everything is wrong!
100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 39
A panicky, last minute render. I ended up recalling a shot from the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Best of Both Worlds.”
I intended to try doing my post work in After Effects rather than Photoshop, but that didn’t work out (apparently, After Effects, 5K frames, and eight-year-old laptops don’t mix).