Fennius' Ships and Images
- Thread starter Fennius
- Start date
Right here we go, a full animation worthy enough to not be called a test:
Still a little janky in places, especially as what seemed a nice smooth pace in the previews in blender turned out to be waaaay too fast, so I had to selectively slow bits, messing with the frame rate, but I've started messing with davinci resolve for some basic editing and it seems to have worked out acceptably.
There's a couple of small changes to the ships actually, I ever so slightly tweaked the depth on the hull texture and added a rough clearcoat so it catches the light better, I slightly darkened the red of the bussards, and I fixed the vane rotation glitch (although with the frame rates slowed you can't actually see it in the flyby scene
- next time!).
Still a little janky in places, especially as what seemed a nice smooth pace in the previews in blender turned out to be waaaay too fast, so I had to selectively slow bits, messing with the frame rate, but I've started messing with davinci resolve for some basic editing and it seems to have worked out acceptably.
There's a couple of small changes to the ships actually, I ever so slightly tweaked the depth on the hull texture and added a rough clearcoat so it catches the light better, I slightly darkened the red of the bussards, and I fixed the vane rotation glitch (although with the frame rates slowed you can't actually see it in the flyby scene
- next time!).
The frame rate alterations really hurt what is otherwise a very cool shot. How are you rendering your previews? In 3DSMax, I can record the viewport frame by frame to get a very quickly produced preview animation. The resulting preview looks terrible, obviously, but is a good way of quickly creating a video file that accurately shows my animation timings. Can Blender do something similar?
The other useful thing I can suggest is to create a very low resolution proxy-mesh of your ship that is linked to your high-res ship. When animating, only have the low-res proxy visible in your workspace/viewport. This will help Blender/Max/etc to minimize having to drop frames or slowing down the animation during playback within the app.
The other useful thing I can suggest is to create a very low resolution proxy-mesh of your ship that is linked to your high-res ship. When animating, only have the low-res proxy visible in your workspace/viewport. This will help Blender/Max/etc to minimize having to drop frames or slowing down the animation during playback within the app.
Oh I just set the viewport shading mode to solid and hit play on the slider. Its defintiely a thing I intend on taking more care with next time, especially if I want to render that high resolution again - the frame rate futzing was very much salvaging the render imo to somehting that was pleasing even if still a little janky.
Ah yeah that looks to be it. IT still seems slower and smoother in the playback than in the raw rendered footage but definitely faster than when it was playing every frame
Ah well live and learn, I am still happy with the end result overall
Also in an oddly specific and amusing though, I am very happy that in this shot the balls are silver!
....
Wait I need to clarify that.
The spherical caps on the end of the nacelles are supposed to be silver but in all the previous ones they've come out oddly dark, I think a combination of the specific shader I used and the cowling often shadowing them.
Here they're exactly as wanted!
....
Wait I need to clarify that.
The spherical caps on the end of the nacelles are supposed to be silver but in all the previous ones they've come out oddly dark, I think a combination of the specific shader I used and the cowling often shadowing them.
Here they're exactly as wanted!
Right that's better, none of that frame rate fuckery
And by setting it to simplify and completely cutting out any post processing in blender I got the whole thing down to a few hours before porting over to davinci resolve*. Camera motions could be smoothed out at the start but I didn't want to make it any longer until I knew how it will turn out.
*In theory it was rendered at 4K and I'm not sure if Davinci would only do HD because I hit simplify, or because the lens flare image I used was distinctly less than HD, but annoyingly setting to upscale on the export was saying it would take an entire day, so 1440p it is
Wasn't quite able to mimic the glare effect I liked in the last render, but the more subtle approach here I think worked well for it, and I'm impressed with how the engine flare turned out for a simple, non animated image thats just tracked and scaled.
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Very nice! The camera move and smoothness is much improved
Honestly the movement at the start is a little fast, it gives me a touch of motion sickness
I really like the results of playing around with warm toned lighting and a soft cool toned glow - not sure it's especially realistic but it *feels* realistic.
The engine flare I'm really happy with, it's literally a stock glow placed over the image and moved/scaled with the engines by hand - davinci's keyframing is very nice and simple from the looks of it
Beautiful work! I wish the animation lasted a few more seconds so the ship finishes it's motion past the camera
I like your lighting as well, which captures something of the TOS movie vibe. What sort of lighting setup do you use?
It's actually the same animation keyframes as the first video I did, just cut down as I wanted the fastest render to just trial the effect -
The lighting effect is some in-blender purple and yellow light trails that actually didn't seem to render out very much because I did this in layers and using the free version of davinci resolve
Bottom layer is the starfield, then I took the render of the ship (with a little bit of glow around the nacelles/body, but most of it didn't seem to port over - was enough though), used a luma key to make it a ghost inage only showing the highlights (though really I'm not certain this step is necessary) motion blurred it to hell, added an echo node to ramp that up more and make it a proper trail, soft glow to bump up the light effect, some colour correction to brighten up the main colour trails and shunt the white afterimage of the ship just a little purple, then composited this above and below the original ship image, the top one with transparency, and adding a blur transition at the end to give jt that feel of gently shedding the energy
I was very much aiming for that TMP era effe t, and while it's not the same I feel it's got a similar vibe
Just reviving this to answer;
My model is approx 944 feet in length, how that translates to an accurate in universe scale I'm not sure. I used Big Jims plans as the starting point for mine, which were drawn up for extensive measurements of the model taken in 2001 for the TMP DE Edition.
I corrected what I believed to be a few slight in accuracies in his plans, so shape and proportion wise I'm pretty confident my model is about as accurate as its possible to get without 3d scanning the actual model itself.
Thank you Lewis for that information
EDIT: Interesting, it just occurred to me that you made your 944' TMP Enterprise smaller than the TOS Enterprise that is usually scaled at 947'.
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