Very lovely work! At first I wasn't certain that the glossy finish would work but it is so well handled that it really give the ship a nice sense of scale and dimension. Thanks for sharing these renders!
Gorgeous. If you're not doing it, you ought to try to make the stars be multi-colored like on the original show. Heck, you can see that some stars are reddish and bluish with the naked eye on Earth, so is space that'd be even more apparent.
Thanks. And believe it or not, the stars are multi-colored--very garishly so! Unfortunately, I haven't yet found the right encoder settings in DaVinci Resolve 16 that don't wash out the color from the stars when I'm rendering an MP4. I know it's DaVinci's MP4 encoder that's the culprit because (a) the rendered frames that contain the moving star background are multi-colored and (b) this doesn't happen when I composite a still image by hand. For example, here's the work-in-progress image that I posted on September 2nd. The stars are definitely a spectrum of colors: Right now I'm only using Resolve because it's free and I needed something that could quickly generate test videos, but when I'm done with modeling and start working on the real project I'll be resubscribing to Adobe Premiere Pro, which I know doesn't have this problem. I suppose I could spend more time trying to debug Resolve, but frankly it's a buggy POS with a goofy sound and visual effects engine. I'd rather hurry up and finish the Enterprise so that I can move on to the other assets I need to convert from LightWave to OctaneRender.
Scott, I am gob-smacked by how elegant this is! I don't know if too many modelers have considered before, what if we applied a finish to the ship that looks more like polished marble than satiny dolphin skin or rusted steel? The psychological effect it gives the viewer is that this vessel is hardened, defiant (to coin a phrase), like a monument. The coppery glint along the rims of the raised letters reinforce this. I'm not looking at something stamped out of a machine. This object is hand-made, polished, like a sculpture. And whereas other high-definition renderings go for an idea of realism by adding weathering, tarnish, chipped paint, battle damage, you're presenting the Enterprise as though it were the Gateway Arch or the Statue of Liberty after its unveiling: awe-inspiring, symbolic of virtues and aspirations. In other words, not your daddy's Chevy. And if some folks find this unrealistic, I'd suggest, think about the imagery this evokes in your mind when you see it. I immediately want to touch this vessel. I feel this ship flying by along the palms of my hands, and it's cool like marble in the sculptor's shop. I really can't wait to see how you apply this finishing ethic to the nacelles. Is it the same surface, or does it reflect light differently, as though it's made of a different material? I love where this is going. DF "You Should Carve Your Blog Address in Roman Letters Somewhere Inside the Rim" Scott
Hi @DFScott! Long time no see. And thank you for that... you articulated my mission statement much more elegantly than I did a while back. The Enterprise has always been real to me. She's certainly been a wellspring of inspiration and imagination ever since I started staring at her nearly a half-century ago. I hope I do right by her.
Just a quickie for today. The exterior of the secondary hull is finally finished, and I revised (again!) the "Christmas lights" visual effect behind the domes at the front of the warp nacelles. Judging by this test clip, I still need to do a little tweaking on the brightness and color saturation of the lights. And in case anyone is interested, there really are ten virtual "bulbs" shaped like old-fashioned Christmas lights behind each set of spinning blades in the domes. After a lot of experimentation, I figured the best way to get as close as possible to replicating the look of that unique effect was to reproduce how they did it fifty years ago on the 11' studio miniature. It's still not quite right, but I like the current look so once I've done my tweaks I'm declaring victory and moving on. Besides adjusting the Christmas lights, the major to-dos are finishing the hangar deck interior built into the aft end of the secondary hull, applying OctaneRender-compatible materials to the warp nacelles and pylons, and a final weatherizing pass on the entire ship. (Original post edited to add a link to the YouTube version of the video. The Vimeo version has a weird "hiccup" I can't seem to undo... argh.)
Thanks . But now it's true confession time. If you freeze the video at a couple of key points you will notice a couple of boo-boos: At 0:16, you will see the stars (which were rendered in a separate pass) shining through not only the sensor dome atop the bridge, but also through the port warp nacelle! It’s a weird alpha layer bug in OctaneRender that I need to figure out. The second problem is the color space of the entire video. Originally (and quite by accident), this was done in what’s called “linear” color space. The still image shown below is taken directly from the plates used to assemble the video–you can see how much darker this was beforehand. I’m still learning about how color spaces work in OctaneRender, but I didn’t want to toss what was otherwise a good video, so I pushed the gamma hard in post-processing. This is not only evident in the fact that the video is much lighter, but also where the colors got “crushed” by the gamma adjustment. This is most obvious at around 0:15, where the deflector dish looks hella out of whack. The visual effect of the “Christmas lights” also gets messed up by the gamma correction, becoming more and more obvious as the Enterprise approaches the camera. D’OH! My partner claims I’m color-blind. Maybe that’s not an entirely inaccurate observation!
It is still beautiful work. If you get your movies to render out like this single image, you will have the best looking TOS-inspired clips out there! Bravo!
Now that's interesting to me. You prefer the darker version? I'm thinking somewhere between that and what came out in the video, but like I said I don't seem to be as good a judge of these things as I thought (either that or the crappy monitor I'm using right now is going to take an unscheduled trip down the stairs pretty soon).
Hmm. Now see, on my monitor this looks very dark, but I'm beginning to think that I'm either misusing my monitor calibration equipment, or it's broken (which is quite possible--the meter is nine years old!), or I'm making a fundamental mistake somewhere along the line in processing... or perhaps some combination of all three. Also, if I went with this darker look, the materials on the hull would definitely need rejiggering. One thing that jumps out immediately is the engraved grid on the primary hull; it's WAY too prominent here because of the darker palette. Still, it is an interesting look. And hey, darker look, darker soundtrack (Edited to add link to YouTube version)
Yeah, that's a bit darker than it should be. It reminds me of the more gunmetal-colored hull they gave the Mirror-Enterprise in TOS-R.
I agree... but I do think more in the direction of the still (which I did slightly adjust on color curves but not gamma) is heading in a good direction. One thing I haven’t been doing yet but need to start doing is adopting a completely linear multipass workflow so that I can more precisely control the final look of the output for where the images and videos will be viewed. Up until now, almost everything has been rendered in sRGB/Gamma 2.2 with only a single “beauty pass” written to 32-bit TIFF files—I’ve only done a few limited experiments with multipass rendering. I haven’t been using a linear editor that handles EXR files, which from what I have read is vital in OctaneRender for achieving good results. My experiments generating multiple passes with TIFFs didn’t work quite right because of the way OctaneRender handles tonemapping; it gets in the way and messes with the gamma when layering together TIFFs for the final result. From what I have read, this is not the case when OctaneRender generates multiple passes to an EXR file.
There is a difference between adjusting the gamma and having a brighter light. I do actually prefer this darker version, but not because it is darker. I think with a brighter light source, you would have the perfect video. Why? The ship doesn't look like plastic this way! I think the ship looks sensational!