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Category Archives: Write-Up
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).
100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 38
A Stargate-inspired picture, set thousands of years ago, imagines the last of the Ancients, crossing paths with the Goa’uld during the rise of their own empire.
I used the portrait orientation to mix things up a bit. Same with the choice of subject.
100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 37
Here’s the image that was going to be yesterday’s render. I ended up having to re-render in the morning when it proved to be too expensive for my usual settings to finish overnight.
It depicts a moment from the “Destiny” novel trilogy, which include a massive Borg attack on the Federation. At this point, a fleet of Cubes has attacked Vulcan, but has briefly been disabled with the same “sleep” command that Picard once used against them. The surviving Starfleet ships quickly move to scuttle the Borg cubes before they wake back up.
One important thing I learned from this image is that Lightwave’s built-in lens flares don’t play nicely with the newer photoreal motion blur (not that surprising, considering how old LW’s flares are). I’d been thinking about making a geometry-based Star Trek torpedo effect anyway, but I’ll have to keep this in mind for shots where flares aren’t easily avoidable.