Sounds like your monitor might be too dark or may need adjustment? While they are lit very moody, they are bright enough to be clear on all my monitors and my iPhone.
If you do go with Jediman's suggestions of brightening the lighting of the room, If I recall, voyager's quarter's sets were also pretty dark, lighting and color pallet. They brightened it up by making the lights in the room divider's entirely lit up. Right now you have the just the blue light around the edges, with the light then bouncing off the material and into the room, what if the wall dividers were the lights? In voyager, they also utilized spotlights on certain elements of the room. Take a look at Janeway's quarters in s5's "Night" for example. The main lights are off, but there are still lights from other sources to light the room Looking over some screen caps of Nemesis, including the deleted scenes of the mess hall and Picard & Data speaking after the wedding, it appears that they had an overhead light placed just at the beam where the windows are. Granted that was a different set entirely, but could still give you some ideas. Or other options, from a render standpoint, adjust the exposure or gamma on the renders. Or the color management, are you using standard or filmic, and what contrast do you use?
Voyager had a much more muted color pallet than TNG, but it wasn't dark, the walls were mostly a light teal color. The quarters right now already have lights at the beams looking at the windows, plus the unique lights below the windows, there already are more than enough light sources I believe. I wanted feedback on the lighting precisely to see if everything was too dark, or if it was only a matter of the area by the windows being to dark. If it's the latter, then it's by design of the TNG set, compounded by the far darker and rougher texture. - TNG sets vs. Voyager/Enterprise-E sets: The original TNG quarters set only had one set of ceiling lights per module. This light was often not enough to light the entire room, but this was somewhat balanced by the secondary colored lights from the columns, and from unrealistic set lighting coming in from the windows, not to mention the very clear painting which bounced light a lot. For Voyager, the same set was used (as was on the Ent-E, that set you mention as the mess hall @batboy853 is actually Picard's quarters and the very same set), but it was modified substantially. The windows area was completely replaced by a new, more vertical window, and a second set of ceiling lights was added to each module, on the new found ceiling space. This greatly increased the overall lighting while at the same time decreasing the distance each light beam needed to travel from the source in order to reach the furthest point from it. - Darker color pallet: I already talked about this point at length before, but as they say, an image speaks more than a thousand words, so here's a comparison render. I've finished a new "reading chair" model as the final piece of furniture that was missing. Here you can see how it looks on the Astraeus quarters, plus below you can see the same render but with the TNG materials applied to the walls, columns, and floor. The second render has less light sources, given that I've removed the ones below the window; however because of the lighter tones on the materials, and the less light absorbent texture on them, the overall lighting is increased substantially. It's not brightly lit, or uniformly lit, but if you want to be accurate to the set, then it should not be any of those things. And yes, I could cheat and add spotlights or increase the default background illumination, but what's the point of having a ray tracing, physically accurate renderer if you do any of that? It would completely ruin the realistic look I'm trying for. So, yeah, that's it for furniture on the Astraeus quarters. There's still more stuff to model, but nothing big. In the end, thanks in large part to Blender 2.8's Weighted Normals modifier, I'm starting to be fairly quick in modeling chairs and other soft body objects now. That doesn't mean I like it... Also, LCARS:
Added more random props, more plants, and some dog toys. Unless my client wants me to change or add something else, I'd call it done.
I'm no expert on lighting.. I'm a great modeler, but Texturing and lighting.. Nope.. I can do basics.. Looking good,a nd hope the client is happy!
@FreddyE: Thanks! Some of the assets would need to be modified in order to be completely sealed, but it would be possible to 3D print them, yes. @valkyrie013: You can certainly do more than just basics. After getting approval, the quarters are confirmed complete. Here are some final renders. I had to crank up the samples per render up considerably more than my usual for finished images, given the the dark spots on this room were wrecking havoc on the denoiser.
Took some time off as I needed to clear my head somewhat and dedicate time to more important things. As mentioned before I've been planning to move out into my own place with my partner later this year, but unfortunately some mental health problems that had been kept under control resurfaced again, so that whole plan kinda came crushing down for the time being. Anyway, just yesterday I've been able to open up Blender again, but I couldn't get to work on anything of the stuff that I need to do... I've been "playing" RPG-X lately (aka, wondering around starships build on the old Quake III engine), and finally I got some inspiration to do something. Yesterday I started heavily modified my existing Constellation bridge, adding elements of the Prometheus bridge, and a floor layout inspired on some interiors from RPG-X, and the color pallet of the Ent-E. I intended this to be for the USS Thunderchild (I want to create bridges for the entire First Contact fleet whenever I have the time/creativity to do so), but in the end I wasn't sure it was the right tone for the class, plus I didn't quite know what to do with the aft section... Anyway, from the ashes of that experiment (which I still have, I might revisit it later), I decided to do a smaller bridge with these parts. The layout is rather similar to the USS Grissom, so it might be a good fit for the Nova, but I decided to go for the Saber-Class USS Yeager, in keeping with the First Contact motif. It's still not finished, as you can see the LCARS are a mix of different styles as I grabbed the consoles from other bridges. I tried doing a holographic viewscreen, but I couldn't make it look good, so I went with a classic style one. The MSD was born because likewise I didn't know what else to put on that aft screen to break things up, instead of just more consoles or more doors. It's a glass panel bolted onto the horizontal metal bars going through the wall, very much like the starship graphics we see in the Starfleet Command replica from 'In The Flesh'. Once I finish it's graphic (heavily inspired by the Saber MSD designed by Alexander Richardson) I'll post some closeups of it.
First, hope everything in real life turns out better for you! Second, seen some bridge layouts for the thunderchild and most have a section for flight ops, like the nx's pool table in the back of the bridge. So maybe that or. A secondary section with a flight ops bridge. For the sabre maybe have the glass a bit like discovery? Screen like? Looking greatg
Great stuff as usual, welcome back to the fold and sorry things did not work out as planned. I am looking forward to your finished stuff as always.
Thanks for the comments and good feelings. I wanted to share the original design of the holo-viewscreen for the Yeager. Just as on First Contact, the logic was that there are generators above and below the viewscreen area, and they create a floating flat image when needed. When it's not in use, the background wall is visible. It's really not that big of a difference from the status quo. For Insurrection, this was replaced with a standard looking screen, which just displays a UFP logo when not in use. This was the original floating screen I created for the Yeager (hence why there are lights on top of the background wall, they made more sense with this screen). I made it a bit curved rather than flat as on the Ent-E, and wider at the bottom, to make it flow better with the light columns at the sides. But alas I didn't quite like it, hence why I ended up replacing it. Ironically, this first screen was the inspiration for the aft "floating" MSD, to make both the front and back of the bridge have a similar looking element at the center.
I like where you're going with the center of the Thunderchild, it feels like a nice way to bring in the secondary command chairs in a circular-style bridge, and the pit in front of it feels like it would fit very well with Voyager's bridge once some rails are added. I like the alternative display for the rear of the Yeager, it feels like a nice way to add some varied looks but still fits things like the SFC display and the Parallels bridge. Same thing with the holo-display, I think it's a nice start toward implementing some cool free-standing stuff like that even if it didn't quite work in this instance. It feels like i may need a more defined boarder and the back glow doesn't quite work for that purpose. Have you ever done an actual Sovereign-style bridge? It feels like you have most of the parts but I don't recall seeing one.
@The Librarian: No, I never did a Sovereign style bridge before. I do have most freestanding elements, but the shell itself is quite a challenging shape. I finished the MSD, and changed the overall color pallet of the bridge to the Insurrection/Nemesis colors. I didn't quite like how the viewscreen looked with the more copper tones it had before. I still have to rework all the perimeter station LCARS, but other than that I think I'm happy with how it looks now.
Nice work! It feels right for a ship that size, about the same dimensions as a Miranda but with a much smaller crew due to more advanced automation.
Fantastic work, love the Ent-E Aesthetic! Glad to have you back, wishing you the best of luck with everything. May I ask how you go about doing your LCARs? What kind of resolution do you need to get them to such a high fidelity? I would be happy with a whole gallery of those to be fair. And with the Holo-Projection idea, is there an option to add a kind of overlay to the MSD at the back? For example highlighting damaged sections overlaid on the etched MSD? That may be hard to emulate, now that I think of it.