Hey guys, here's a mini update: Modeled some sickbay medical tools, and have also worked on some animated 2d LCARS for the displays in sickbay. The displays I will show later as they are not yet in the scene, but here are some medical tools. Modeled these based off of references from http://startrekpropcollector.com/ also looked to renaissance_man's postings over at therpf.com. The hypo modeled off of available blueprints. Additionally the materials include blinking lights for use in animated scenes!
@Santaman thanks! Got the animated displays into the center console today. Right now the central display is a temporary one, or possibly what will be in the display when there is no patient being examined on the surgical bed. My plan for the central display for when there is a patient will be very simple, a silhouette of a humanoid figure, with text that appears line by line. While re-watching Voyager these past few weeks, I noticed that they would swap out the "Patient Biomedical Status" display when there was a patient at the bed where the display is at. Seems pretty obvious why, no patient means no vitals to read, I guess I never really paid that close attention to those displays until now. They even did the same in the Doctor's office. I am doing the same in my sickbay set, which is why the "Patient Biomedical Status" display is blank currently, however I do have an animated version that has the squiggle lines running across the screen. The Molecular Analysis is animated with the balls spinning, however this version is a more simplified version than what is seen on the show. On the upper right is a Multi-base Analysis display where I have two DNA sequences running across the display, then they line up, and blink to indicate a DNA match. The aluminum detailing above and below the LCARS display is also different from what was seen on the "On screen" version of this set piece, as we did not get a good look at the display, and what I did see I was not much of a fan of. Also I have made a change to some of my compositor nodes, let me know if this version looks better? Old: New:
More updates!!! Made the Biobed display, and based it off of the Voyager s1 / s2 version of the display. They changed it after the second or third episode of season 3. But it was able to find more close up shots of the s1 / s2 version. I also modeled some stools. Finally I slapped padds in all of the wall terminals, the graphic is a placeholder. The padds are mini versions of the TNG padds. After this I will go back and fill in some details around the set, things that I missed like the square covers that appear on the dividers between the beds (it was also the jeffery's tube hatch on the VOY set). I also plan on going back and adding more details on the terminals behind the beds. I will likely model a med kit as it appeared in DS9. And I am going to slap the set stickers all over the place (previous sets i've built I skipped these guys.)
@Santaman Thank you! I really wanted to see how much detail I could put into this scene. On that note: the past week I have really focused on what areas of the set needed more love in terms of details. I added set labels!!! These took longer because I decided to model the stickers rather than use a texture. Converted the text to mesh, then used a Boolean modifier to join to the oval sticker. Looking back on it I probably could have saved time by doing the stickers in illustrator and exporting as an SVG, but oh well. The reason why I modeled the stickers; when I was working on my animation, I ran into a VRAM limit. For my next attempt I might be able to conserve VRAM in certain areas by using channel packing on my character textures. I modified the walls behind the biobeds so that the detail is modeled in, and not textured. I also added detailing into the terminals behind each bed. I modeled the hatches that are on the dividers between the beds. I also modeled a random computer based off of one that is seen on TNG, so that the 4th shelf in the room was not empty, but I might replace it with something else down the line. For the moment I am not sure what else I can add to the scene, was thinking of the trolley carts scene in TNG, but to be honest I am running out of gas on this scene, and it is now to the point that if I wanted to I could use it for an animation. I also need to add additional textures to some of the various props in the room, such as LCARS buttons to the genetic sequencer, the hypo-loader, and the petri-dish thingy These renders are semi final, but I am probably going to start working on something else in the upcoming days.
Overall I love this set, the only comment I could have is that maybe it's a bit too same-y as far as lighting goes, it's very evenly lit. Doing a bit more dramatic lighting could help give the walls and objects more "texture" without needing to actually model anything else, spotlights always help with that, IMO. Also, I think you have all the stools backwards, the ones between the biobeds are looking at the wall while the ones next to the LCARS panels are looking away from them.
@Rekkert you are right they are. I'll fix that. As far as lighting, can I ask how you set up your emissive materials? Right now I just have an emissive material, as is. The lights above the beds are set to 1, then the main ceiling is set to .75. I've played around with using a Blackbody node, but it just did not look right. Also the lights are being emitted from a flat face, I am not sure if this is the best way of doing it. I'm considering extruding the faces emitting light up a bit, and then using an area lamp. I love how area lamps can light the scene, but you need to have them lined up just right with what should be emitting light in the scene for it to look correct. I also have spot lights above each of the beds.
Last week I started working on a corridor set. To make things easier on me, I am not following the exact stage 9 layout. The set is a circle for now, but I plan on adding branching corridors. The set is partially based off of the Ent-E corridors around engineering. Here is a WIP walk / lighting test.
If you're using Filmic for the color management, I'd suggest never going above .75 for an emissive material, otherwise you end up killing any sort of highlight and detailing. As for how I tackle them, it depends on the era I'm targeting and the size of each panel. For large panels like those in the center of your sickbay, I try and avoid using a single color material, I often use gradients and UV map the mesh accordingly. For example here are the panels on Potemkin's ready room and the TNG observation lounge: And here's the node setup for said observation lounge panels: When I do use a single color, it's to emulate either studio floodlights such as here or here on the main dome, but keep in mind that one thing is the color the camera sees, and another is the color that's actually emitted and that interacts with the scene. That's necessary in order to mimic how things were sometimes lit on Trek using lights behind the camera which we obviously don't have, so the overall light was often very different from the color the ceiling was. Here's the node setup for the Cerberus bridge dome, you can see I'm showing the camera a nearly white emissive with 1.0 strength, but I'm actually illuminating the scene with a .75 emissive with a bluer color: Finally as far as materials go, lights such as those you have above the beds often had small grating patterns on them on set, so I use a grated texture to emulate this look, thus avoiding it looking so homogeneous. When I do use light objects (and I mostly don't), it's just to complement emissives on things like spotlights where shadows and bounces off the walls are more noticeable and important, or on highlights like the center light of a bridge. These are dim though (again, the emissive is already there). For example here on the Victory bridge you can see the spotlights added below the emissive on the circumference of the bridge, these are set to 2.5w, while on the center light it's at 10w. Keep in mind having reflective materials on the LCARS means that if you use spotlights you MUST set them to Multiple Importance OFF, otherwise the light will appear as an object in the reflections.
@Rekkert , Thank you very much for that write up, it was very informative. I will go back and take a look at the sickbay set and take at how I can implement some of the tips you suggested. Also thanks for the suggestion with the Multiple importance bit, when I was trying to light my corridor set, I added area lights and noticed that they showed up in the reflections on some panels.
@Rekkert so I made the lighting changes, set the center room lighting to a gradient as you recommended, and then did the same for the lights along the sides of the room, then used a brick texture to give it the grating effect. I'm still playing around with it. I'm not sure if this is "better" as the scene just feels overall dark now. Playing around with the white balance in the compositor did not seem to help much either. I also removed the spot lights I had hanging over each of the beds.
I think the lighting of the room is now more diffuse and less harsh, think patients will appove of that.
I agree with Santaman, I wouldn't say it looks dark now, just not overly bright and more natural. Does this lighting works with characters in the room, or are they not properly illuminated?
@Santaman good to hear if it is an improvement I will keep it as is. @Rekkert I will test out characters in the scene the next time I am able to and will post the results. My initial thought would be the characters will likely appear too dark, and point to the corridor video posted above as reference. With that scene I ended up adding in a second view layer with area lamps to add light to the characters, and then used a mix RGB Node in the compositor set to Add, and then to give the lighting a more natural feel I did a shadow pass, and plugged that into the factor of the add node. Blending the lighting of the character on the two view layers. using the shadow pass gave the lighting a bit more contrast as well. Was happy with that result. Perhaps that's just the way I need to do it. (But was hoping I would be able to do it all with one view layer to save on render time.) Since posting that video I have actually added a second mix RGB Add node to brighten the character a bit more. Today I created the systems analysis LCARS display for one of the corridor pieces. I am not on my normal laptop now so I don't have any renders, but will post some either this weekend or Monday.
@Rekkert @Santaman Here are some renders as promised! At some point I must have adjusted the lighting in the sickbay scene because it is slightly different from the last render I posted, but I can barely tell the difference. Hopefully it is barely noticeable to you guys as well. The first image is with the lighting as is in the scene, the second post is added light on the characters on a second view layer, then composited on to the main render layer. Additionally here are some renders from the WIP corridor
I think having your characters in the scene is a good yardstick. Assuming that their surfaces (like skin, clothes) are setup to be PBR materials then I think your light sources in the scene are set too low of an output and the room is too dim. I don't think you should add a second light pass for your characters unless you want to hit them with spotlights like a tv/movie production, IMHO.
There is a noticable difference, on the scene where you added the lighting on the characters the characters themselves look more like being in the scene because for example the way their shoulders and head/face look like one of the ceiling lights are shining on them. Those corridors look great. That LCARS panel is a nice detail and contrast with being so coloutful compared to the walls.
Yeah, I do like how they look with the added lights, and they do fit in. The thing to keep in mind is that this is how it's usually done, adding more lights for people; not only in TV sets like in Trek but also even in 3D environments like animated movies and games, otherwise your environments end up being unrealistically bright. Real life environments aren't usually arranged in a way that lits up people properly and evenly across an entire room hahaha. By the way, how do you have your light bounces set up in Blender? I do LOVE that corridor set by the way, it incorporates all the good elements of a bunch of different designs, it's perfect!
@blssdwlf @Santaman I think going forward this will be how I do it with characters. There are a few things that I need to do with some of the textures for the characters (channel packing) to save on VRAM for scenes where there are more characters. This frame rendered in just under 2 minutes, including the 2 view layers and the compositing. When I do close ups with the characters in the scene they really look great! @Rekkert I normally use the default bounces, for my short I used half of what the default bounces are. Previously I clamped direct light to the 1.0 setting, but if I am going to be lighting the scene with lights no brighter than an emission setting of 1, then I can set it to 0.0 Actually for the last renders with the sickbay characters, it looks like at some point I went with the full global illumination preset... Oops maybe that's why they look slightly different from last week lol This is currently my compositing node setup One thing to note with how it's setup, I have the additional light of the characters getting added to the overall image after the glare node, because otherwise it made the characters look over saturated. Also I have an emit pass coming from main scene render, in order to make the displays and overhead lights glow. (I have to play with how much I add, because otherwise it can make the displays look too bright.) As far as the corridors, I honestly should thank @Donny because I looked to one of his Ent-E corridors when I made them, but also got other measurements from the Nemesis set plans that were posted a few months back. And also of course @Redgeneral because he is doing an amazing job with creating blueprints for the Voyager project and the Galaxy Project. On top of that, Rekkert, you gave me the tip on the ceiling lights, and helped me setup the material for the back lit displays. I've learned so much from you guys this past year.