Category Archives: Write-Up

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.

100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 19

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CDCR-019-Challenger_Spy_Photo_Credits

Another picture from clearing out my mental junk drawer. The idea was a Klingon spy photo of the U.S.S. Challenger, a model by Dennis Bailey which combined the design cues from the Enterprise from the 2009 Star Trek movie with the proportions of the original design. In my head, I decided it was a one-off prototype trying out the design features that became mainstream in the timeline of the remake films, but which didn’t catch on in the original Star Trek universe.

I conceived of the shot as an animation, and I may take another whack at that concept, since my original idea is very different from what I ended up with. I changed the setting to the Utopia Planita shipyards at Mars, and populated the scene with ships and drydocks. I intended to mark up the image with Klingon text, my computer isn’t seeing the Klingon fonts for some reason. All in all, I’d say this is a bit of a dud of an image, which isn’t surprising considering the amount of supporting infrastructure I’d have to put into it to get it right (starting with a full Klingon graphics package).

100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 18

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CDCR-018-Ships_Leave_Excalibur_credits

As promised, with a few modifications, quantum space has become hyperspace. Aside from recoloring from blue to red, I made the bright bands pulsing from one end of the environment to the other more subtle, and added proxy objects and lights to represent the “lightning flashes” that were present in the Babylon 5 version of hyperspace.

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100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 17

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CDCR-017-White_Stars_in_QSpace_creditsMore quantum space today. The real meat is in this tiny test-rendered animation. I think I’ve just about nailed the animation and arrangement, and even that weird ring-thing. The scene lighting is a bit trickier to get down, but that’s true for any sort of hyperspace-style environment like this that doesn’t have traditional light-sources or, potentially, laws of physics. I have a feeling rendering in passes and generous amounts of post-processing effects will make it look suitably surreal and alternate-dimension-y.

Next up will be adjusting it to match the red-colored look of Babylon 5’s original hyperspace, and then I can put this one in the books.