For Blu-Ray, will TMP have to have all new FX?

[Manticore]

I mostly do space stuff (to my shame, and I'm trying to fix that ), but I'll show a few things. I was actually looking back through my collected works, and I realized that I only had a few pieces that I'm really proud of now. Ah, the joys of being an artist. But space and night scenes are (largely) similar enough for these purposes.

Here's a decent enough example. Not great, but decent:


The bridge is quite a bit brighter than the actual hull, as is the bussard on the starboard nacelle. However, looking at it from a few months' remove, I should have pushed that a lot further, because the highlight under the registry and the light bit behind the bridge seem a bit dull to me now.

Here's another one:


The nacelles are a lot brighter than the rest of the hull, which I like though I'm seriously wondering about some of the color correction choices that I made, especially with regard to the bussards and the windows...

That said, I don't hold either of these up as shiningly great examples. I hadn't realized just how much that I'd learned about lighting, compositing, and color correction over the last couple of months while working on a certain #$!@ animation...

The following two images are from the aforementioned animation, stills of the first and second shots:





They aren't as dark as my work tends to be because I wanted to break away from my tendency to make incredibly dark works. That, and I was inspired by the cover of Greater than the Sum by Christopher Bennett. I wanted to evoke a similar feel of exploration and discovery, hence the overall brighter tones than the previous two works.

But with that said, there's still noticeable dark spots even with these two images. The terminator of the planet is very dark (I justify the 'night side' being so bright because the ship is on that side too! ), and so are the undersides of the nacelles in the first image and the top of the yacht and the bottom of the turret in the second. The region on the front side of the secondary hull would have been black too, I think, except when I tried that, the lighting in the second shot was very dull and flat.

And, to break up the relentless Trek fanboyism of this post*:





*I'm planning/hoping to finally break away from Trekdom with my next animation and do something a little more grounded...to a degree, at least.

I'm sorry that these weren't quite what you were asking for Biggles. Given more time...and a computer not utterly devoted to rendering clouds...I could have whipped up something a little more to order.

 

[trevanian]

I mostly do space stuff (to my shame, and I'm trying to fix that ), but I'll show a few things. I was actually looking back through my collected works, and I realized that I only had a few pieces that I'm really proud of now. Ah, the joys of being an artist. But space and night scenes are (largely) similar enough for these purposes.

Here's a decent enough example. Not great, but decent:


The bridge is quite a bit brighter than the actual hull, as is the bussard on the starboard nacelle. However, looking at it from a few months' remove, I should have pushed that a lot further, because the highlight under the registry and the light bit behind the bridge seem a bit dull to me now.

That top one looks pretty good to me. You get points for your explanation in the earlier post too.

That last image, the non-trek one ... if somebody could manufacture a material that draped and glowed like that for real, I'd be a customer.

 

[Manticore]

I mostly do space stuff (to my shame, and I'm trying to fix that ), but I'll show a few things. I was actually looking back through my collected works, and I realized that I only had a few pieces that I'm really proud of now. Ah, the joys of being an artist. But space and night scenes are (largely) similar enough for these purposes.

Here's a decent enough example. Not great, but decent:


The bridge is quite a bit brighter than the actual hull, as is the bussard on the starboard nacelle. However, looking at it from a few months' remove, I should have pushed that a lot further, because the highlight under the registry and the light bit behind the bridge seem a bit dull to me now.

That top one looks pretty good to me. You get points for your explanation in the earlier post too.

That last image, the non-trek one ... if somebody could manufacture a material that draped and glowed like that for real, I'd be a customer.

Turn yourself into a 3ds Max model, and we'll talk prices.

Thanks for the kind words on the image as well, BTW.

 

[Gepard]

Just to muddy the waters some more, here are some adjusted versions of the Poseidon effects shot from upthread.

First, to address ST-One's statement that the brighter shadows are due to moonlight: while it is true that that would result in some fill illumination on the shadow side of the object, there would still be areas of deep shadow, in cracks and crevasses at the very least, that would be pure black.

For reference, here is the original:

When I opened it in Photoshop and checked the levels, here's what I got:

Note that on the very left of the slider, the histogram falls off to nothing before reaching the zero point. Zero is pure black; 255 pure white. This means the FX shot has no pure black in it at all--the darkest it ever gets is about 95% of the way there. This is unnatural, especially for a night scene. This is also what DS9Sega was addressing when he talked about dropping the chroma out of the image, only this way we don't need to do any suspicious tampering to see the range of values present in the image.

Now when I move the slider up to adjust the darks down to black, here's what we get:

Resulting in:

Much better already.

Additional adjustments to overexpose the brights (per Manticore), plus the addition of some bloom to the lights gives us:

And if we want we can color adjust the lights to better match the real photo, like so:

For comparison:

I hope that clears a few things up. Not that the original Poseidon still is a bad one, it's just one of those things that needs a little tweaking to get just right; it is a common problem with CG imagery that the finer adjustments at the end get overlooked. This happens on the Remastered TOS all the time...

 

[ST-One]

For comparison:

I actually like the higher-contrast image...
But look closely: nowhere in the QM2 image are the blacks as deep as you present them now in the adjusted image (except for the black painted parts of the hull).

That said, the addition of the bloom to create the overexposed look on the windows (and all the other lights) is

 

[Gepard]

I actually like the higher-contrast image...
But look closely: nowhere in the QM2 image are the blacks as deep as you present them now in the adjusted image (except for the black painted parts of the hull).

...which could have been avoided if the image had been lit better and/or been brightness adjusted from the raw output files. The problem is that the darks of the original image were too flat; some of that hull in the shadow side should indeed have been brighter than pure black, but because there were no blacks in the deep shadows as there should have been, adjusting the image came down to one of two options:

1. Leave is as it was, with the blackpoint too light, but the overall brightness of the shadow side in the ballpark, or
2. Bring the darks down to give deep shadows, at the expense of losing some detail and brightness in some of the shadow areas. This choice isn't perfect, but its the lesser of two evils.

The real issue is that there was no image information at all in that bottom 5% of the histogram which could have differentiated between the 100% black shadows and the, say, 97% black hull plating (as there should have been); it's all squeezed into the 95% "blacks." But at least adjusting the histogram down faked more realistic shading.

That said, the addition of the bloom to create the overexposed look on the windows (and all the other lights) is

Bloom makes everything better.