Category Archives: Photoshop

100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 30

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CDCR-030-Shadows_Attack_B4_credits

As I was working on my Star Trek 50th Anniversary picture last night, I wanted a quicker set-up for today’s render. Luckily, The Audio Guide to Babylon 5 dropped their episode on War Without End last night, giving me a fine bit of inspiration.

I’ve been avoiding images of Babylon 4 (and 5) since those models are older, and it’s easier to make more flattering images with more up-to-date models. Only one of the models in this image even has a self-lighting rig. Still, it gives me a foundation I might revisit later in the future.

I also tried my hand at the Shadow’s “phasing” effect, similar to the classic Star Trek cloaking device. I’m fairly sure the original show did the effect in 3D, but I haven’t had a lot of success with it when I’ve tried. More experimentation will be required.

100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 29

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CDCR-029-JJPrise_credits

With this last test, I’m set for Thursday’s picture. This model is a bit hefty for my poor old laptop, so I didn’t get to do a lot of experimentation with angles and lighting for this shot. I just went for the first idea I had. I tried for too much quality on the render so it wasn’t close to finished this morning, which is why it’s smaller than usual.

100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 26

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CDCR-026-Fancy_Meeting_You_Here_credits

It occurred to me yesterday that we’re now about a week away from Star Trek’s 50th anniversary, so I should probably do something Star Trekky and special for my September 8th picture. I’ve got an idea, but I’ll need a fairly large amount Star Trek ship models that I haven’t used before (or, in a while). I think they’re all available in the hobbyist 3D community, though I might need to put some elbow-grease into getting them to work with Lightwave. So, expect a bit of a Star Trek focus of the next few days, as I convert, test, and generally get to know some of these models.

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100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 25

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CDCR-025-Discovery_Departure_credits

I was reminded by a recent XKCD strip that I hadn’t done any 2001: A Space Odyssey images, yet.1My logic? It occurred to me that HAL 9000 doesn’t count because, technically, Jupiter was hurled into him. My first instinct was to do an image of the derelict Discovery above Io, but my old Jupiter-and-moons setup scene was giving me some peculiar rendering errors.

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References
↑1 My logic? It occurred to me that HAL 9000 doesn’t count because, technically, Jupiter was hurled into him.

100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 24

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CDCR-024-Is_Something_Living_In_Hyperspace_credits

“If something living in hyperspace bothers you…good, it should.”

One of the things I want to do with my Babylon 5 project is hide the Shadow ships for as long as possible. I’m not sure when your first good look at one should be, but I think the shape and size of them should be less clear than it was in the first part of the show. They were referred to as “shadows” for a reason, after all.

This was an experiment in this philosophy. I nestled the Shadow ship up against one of the dark gaps in the hyperspace environment, and used a depth map to submerge it within the clouds. It makes it harder to tell where the ship ends and hyperspace begins, which was my goal.

And little Warren Keffer’s Starfury cruises by, unaware of what’s lurking out of sight…

100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 23

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CDCR-023-Archer_Approaches_Planet_credits

There is an art, or rather a knack, to lighting ships in the style of the original Star Trek. I don’t think I’ve developed it yet. I’ve had some success with extraordinary lighting situations, but for a straight-up space shot, I can’t seem to keep things from looking flat. In this, I tried to compensate by going more high-contrast, but that tends to draw attention to the seams between the intersections of the hull and saucer.

100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 22

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CDCR-022-Fireflying_credits

I generally like to tell a little story with my images. One of the things I’ve found myself doing (and will probably have to lean in to) during this project is doing more quotidian images. That’s probably not the worst thing; on the TV shows and movies that first made me want to get into this field, many of the shots were just establishing shots. Nothing but the camera, one subject, and some lights, communicating nothing beyond the fact that there’s a thing here, and in a moment, we’ll be seeing the people inside it.

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100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 21

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CDCR-021-Basestar_Fleet_creditsThe models from Battlestar Galactica Online render surprisingly well. Aside from the foreground Basestar, you can hardly tell the ships are video-game quality. Maybe I’ll go on another expedition to pull more models out from the game’s files. That’s pretty much all there is to this image. I was applying the texture maps to the model, saw how nicely the light played along it and how well the little window-things stood out, and decided to instance out a bunch more Basestars and add some fill light. It definitely helps that, in the show, the Cylons never seemed to care much for the orientation of their ships. There are a few places were they overlap in the frame, but I checked, there weren’t any intersections. The random seed just doesn’t have a good eye for composition.

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100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 20

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CDCR-020-Challenger_in_Cloud_Credits

I wanted to do another picture with the Challenger, on account of the last one not working out. I tried for an asteroid-filled nebula, but ran into a couple problems instancing asteroids (didn’t work), and using volumetric light-rays (very expensive). The image didn’t come close to finishing the render overnight, so I dialed down all the settings to get something finished this morning. I then brought it into Photoshop, where I had trouble making it sing. My ultimate solution was just piling layers on top of layers on top of layers until I got a crazy, over-exposed artsy-looking image.