Architect's Stuff

[Architect]

Riker's Beard only knows if I will actually have need for an art thread. I wasn't much for keeping up with new stuff to post last time I was here. But in the spirit of planning ahead, I'm gonna go on and make one.

To start with, we have the ship I started working on when I heard about the 2016 SotL contest. I stopped working on her because I'm not insane. To do a worthy submission, I'd need to develop a bunch of skills I'm not really interested in having. At least not as much as I'm interested in having other skills. I'd vaguely like to have mad photorealism skills, but I got other bridges to burn, first.

I did like where the ship was going, though, as far as her form. I'd settled on the USS Bradbury. Not the best choice, given all the stabs at that ship there are out there, and the fact that I really wanted a classic shape. Around the same time someone (I don't remember who or where) made comment on the Belknap Class's "routine detachable" warp nacelles. That comment was basically, "WHY!?!?!?!?!!!!!!1111"

I saw their point. OTOH, I was also thinking about why the Bradbury would be spending so much time testing warp drives. I mean, just how much testing does a drive need? (Probably more than I think.) Those two ideas came together, and I decided that the Bradbury was purpose built to test warp drives, and in that spirit, had built in a "routine detachable" system for the nacelles. Saves time refitting the ship for a new warp drive. Also saves time building test articles. While testing of warp field dynamic interaction with a new hull requires a new hull, long-term tests of the drive components can be carried out just by building a set of nacelles and bolting them to the Bradbury.

This is done in Blender (of course). I only whipped this one up because I like how she looks with drives powered down.

I realize she'd have never flown (as it were), another reason I abandoned the effort (I could have chosen a different ship. Most of the reason was deficit of skill). I do like her though.

 

[Kaiser]

Reminds me of the TWOK era Belknap Class

which gives it +5 awesome

 

[Architect]

Sadly, a lot of my ideas start with the Belknap.

I just like that ship.

 

[Architect]

Mostly toying with background effects, but added some more lighting, to get a sense for how to actually do that in Cycles.

Kind of a pain, but it seems good enough for government work. So far I've rendered everything "Space" lit. The ship is actually white.

Like FFFFF white.

 

[Kaiser]

I like the Belknap also

and its derivative designs based on it

It just seems more well designed than the Constitution Class Refit IMHO

 

[Irishman]

Great stuff, Architect! You seem to have gotten a handle on the TNG curvilinear style of modeling. That stuff intimidates me, because I feel I need to try to be screen accurate, and haven't developed the prowess in Blender yet for that.

 

[Architect]

Thanks! I keep trying to post something relevant here, and I keep losing the comment. I think the fates just don't want me to say that.

I've found the trick to learning blender is being willing to be horribly, terribly, and other-bly wrong.

These days I mostly do materials based stuff. I just use Daz Studio for character creation, and do my rendering in Blender. I do want to get back into modeling, though. When I said over in Irishman's thread that I don't do photo real, this is what I mean I do.

There's post work here. I added the background Everything about the character is done in blender, without freestyle

 

[MadMan1701A]

I think it looks good.

So, do you pose the character and facial expressions in Daz, and then export it into Blender, or can you bring over the armature and do all of that in Blender?

-Ricky

 

[Architect]

I could bring over the armature, but a lot of the little details in Daz facial expressions are in morphs. I have no idea how to deal with that, and I don't really see the point.

I do love me some Blender, and I will go out of my way to make it works for things it wasn't strictly intended to do (I could have pulled a simple toon effect with Blender internal, for example, but I did Cycles which is designed for "realistic" light behavior. I could have used the Cyles toon shader, but... ). That said, if a tool already exists that does what I want, I'll use that. Studio is just a whole lot better at managing those fiddly bits, which frees me up to focus on developing the materials and trying to perfect this digital painting look I've been after.

 

[Architect]

I haven't had time to think, much less work on any kind of art or starships. Of course being the obsessive personality that I am that didn't stop me. But I didn't do a lot of work generally I just putzed seeing if I could figure out a technique for making decent panel lines.

I did. Or, rather, I actually tried out the technique that I had suggested to Irishmen on a subsurfed model and, maybe, figured out how to make it work well. I'm not sure, so no pictures of that. Instead, here's the work in progress from an abandoned attempt at a JJ-verse Excelsior.

 

[Kaiser]

Looks cool

 

[Architect]

Orthos

My thoughts: Too rakish. She needs to lean back and slow down a bit. I don't want to throw away the racing profile, but it's overdone.

The neck needs to beef up, possibly with a top to bottom taper. The top of the primary hull could use to come up a bit, as well. Iffy there, because I'm not sure how much I can safely raise the nacelles. I'll have to play with that. The ramp at the back of the neck could be a bit shorter, and bring the pylon attachment dome down closer to the hull. I'm not super happy with the way the pylons are hidden in the front view.

 

[Irishman]

Thanks! I keep trying to post something relevant here, and I keep losing the comment. I think the fates just don't want me to say that.

I've found the trick to learning blender is being willing to be horribly, terribly, and other-bly wrong.

These days I mostly do materials based stuff. I just use Daz Studio for character creation, and do my rendering in Blender. I do want to get back into modeling, though. When I said over in Irishman's thread that I don't do photo real, this is what I mean I do.

There's post work here. I added the background Everything about the character is done in blender, without freestyle

This is extraordinary!

I don't want to stop looking at it.

 

[Architect]

This is extraordinary!

I don't want to stop looking at it.

Really, thank you. I'm always changing how I do it, because issues (this one is super sensitive to lighting and only works well with sun lamps, which is a pain for interior scenes). Also, it doesn't work so well on hard surfaces.

I'm still trying to figure that out. Partly because I want to continually improve me art business but also because this kind of NPR is a very challenging thing in Cycles. So much so, that most people just don't bother. While I haven't (and can't) solve what I think is the base reason for projects like BEER (that this kind of shading is computationally expensive) I'm getting close to a point where that doesn't matter so much to the artist, and I think people would like to know how to do it.

If I can get the background problem solved, I'll feel good about doing some tutorials on what I've done. Maybe it's not really worthwhile to anyone, but it's thanks to people sharing knowledge that I know what I know, and if I'm really one of the very few who know how to do this, it's kind of uncool for me not to share, right?

 

[Architect]

Toon style Aztec. This is much more difficult to do than you'd think.

As before, the hull color is white. In this case, I've moved to something with a slight blue tint (F9F9FF). It's rendered under single blender sun at strength 0.78.

Here it is at strength 6, which seems to be the low end of the sweet spot for Cycles toon shading.

 

[Architect]

Apparently I don't type fast enough to make the board happy. So no explanation, because I don't want to type it again.

Enterprise mesh by David Metlesits, IIRC. She's just there for scale.

 

[Kaiser]

Lovely ship

 

[martok2112]

Architect, this is some great looking stuff.
You use Daz. Have you ever heard of, or used iClone, which can use Daz figures?

 

[Architect]

I'd never heard of iClone before now. Part of me thinks that's nifty, but the more practical side of me asks how to get the potential of it into blender, and then asks how the hell I'd manage to pay for the electricity needed to animate, considering the amount of time it takes to render this stuff.

I mean, it's actually fairly fast. I think that retread of the Renown only took 20 minutes to CPU render. On the GPU, it would be 5 minutes or less. But that means a render time of 2.5 hours per second.

I'd have to be making pretty decent money before I'd really look at animation seriously. Though I have done some test animation using my shaders, and it's not too bad. It could possibly work as a form of cartoon that didn't look too obviously 3D.

 

[martok2112]

Relatively speaking, iClone is the most inexepensive, high quality animation app out there on the market, in my very humble opinion.

The workflow would require one more program, also by Realusion, in order to allow you to import/export between iClone and Blender...that program is called 3DExchange.

All told, I think for the pipeline of iClone, 3DExchange, and Blender (which itself of course is free, and I love that program) is probably about $450 to maybe $500.

iClone 6 PRO, I am chomping at the bit to get...just after I get a new computer. The stuff it is capable of seems stunning for its price point.

Keep up the great work!