Top notch renders Vektor. I'm curious did you use a mirrorball to make the HDRI for that driveway shot in Mental Ray? or did you just play with the lighting until you got it right? I plan on trying a composite for my shuttle with a mirrorball soon (gotta find one). From what I have seen it makes composites darn near perfect.
I did not use a mirror ball but I did use a generic mirror ball image I found online that was taken in a similar environment. I would like to experiment with that at some point but for this image I was more concerned with matte/shadow effects. Originally, I was using a geosphere (invisible to camera) with a light emitting environment map but I couldn’t get any shadows to appear on my ground plane. I did some research and found out that Mental Ray does not support GI shadows on matte/shadow objects; there has to be an actual light source to cast them, not just a light emitting texture on a geosphere. This was really annoying as I have become almost totally dedicated to the Mental Ray renderer and this struck me as a pretty huge deficiency. As it turned out, my disappointment was a little premature, but I’ll get to that in a minute.
The alternative is to link an environment map to a skylight, which accomplishes pretty much the same thing as a self-illuminated geosphere but is a lot harder to control. So I reconfigured the scene to work that way and, lo and behold, I still had no shadows on the ground plane! I spent a frustrating day trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and finally realized the matte/shadow material on the ground plane was set to ignore shadows from any objects further than a couple of inches away. The scene was built to scale with the
Enterprise model being 14 or 15 feet long and about 5 inches off the ground, so naturally there were no shadows. Once I fixed the distance problem, they showed up just fine.
Now, the latest version of Mental Ray has a new “Matte/Shadow/Reflection (mi)” shader that supersedes the old one, so I got to wondering if it also supported GI shadows. I switched back to the self-illuminated geosphere, making sure my ground plane had the new shader applied and that the shadow distance parameter was set correctly. To my pleasant surprise, the shadows showed up this time, so apparently, MR
does support GI shadows on matte/shadow surfaces as of the most recent version or two.
Okay, that's just f***ing brilliant
. You got the lighting perfect.
Well, almost. The exposure level on the ship is a little off from the background plate, which is most obvious where I am superimposed on it and looking a little too bright and crisp. The shadows cast by the ship are also not quite dense enough, and the quick and dirty shadows I Photoshopped onto my legs and on the ship’s hull beneath my hand could use some additional work. Still, not too bad considering I was just messing around with something I’d never tried before.
I don't even have words to express how wonderful your work is. JJ Abrams really should have hired you and not whatever hack put together the new Enterprise.
If you like my version better, fine, I won’t argue with that, but let’s not attack the people who put the new one together. They certainly were not “hacks,” they just had a different idea of what the ship ought to look like.
I'm tempted to convert one of the PL 1701 kits into one of these. I have an extra 1:1000 to play with, but I'm wondering if it would be practical (for me to store/display) to do it with one of the up coming 1:350 ones. Hmm...
Now
that would be interesting to see. It would probably require some extensive modifications to do it accurately, though; even though my version has the same proportions as the original, almost every major piece has a slightly different cross-section. The edge of the primary hull is slightly more rounded off and protuberance at the bottom has a sleeker profile. The neck is wider and more of a tapered oval. The secondary hull has a larger diameter and slightly more curved profile at the front. The nacelle struts are thicker, more rounded and angled backward. And the nacelles are probably the most unique of all, much more tapered toward the back and with a slight taper toward the front as well, plus numerous other detail differences. You’re welcome to give it a shot and I would love to see the result. I could probably even provide some 2D schematics for reference. I should point out, however, that I’m technically not finished with the model and I can’t rule out some additional significant modifications.
