TOS Enterprise 3D model - first animation test is posted!

[lomitus]

Alrighty, for those who have been following my exploits in trying to put together a little animation project of the TOS Enterprise, I now have a 30 second animation test posted to my Youtube account for review, comments and critiques (I actually have 4 others before this, but this is the most recent and the best of the lot so far).

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I'm still trying to hammer out the lights and have a few rendering issues that I need to work out before I start working out the actual scenes/shots I want for the full animation, but she's come a long way in two weeks!

Anyways, those who have 30 seconds to spare, please take a look and lemme know what you think!

Thanks!

 

[martok2112]

I really liked that!!!!

It is the classic design, but definitely looks like she'd be right at home in TMP era. Well done!

 

[lomitus]

Thanks. The big challenge now is to try and find a way where she looks a bit more "real". Although not nearly as cartoonish as the earlier attempts and tests, she still looks rather CG...need to figure out what else I can do there. Also need to look more into the render settings and such...the ambient occlusion passes are going REALLY slow for some reason (which seems really weird since there isn't any color info in there).

She's getting closer though...

 

[martok2112]

The specularity looks good....and from certain angles, she definitely gets closer to photorealistic, at least in my eyes.

Maybe brighten up the ship just a slight bit.... not overly so. I think I know the effect you're going for... the harsh lighting sort of effect from, say, 2001 or Alien. I also get a sense that you're going for a lighting effect similar to what Andrew Probert envisioned in a pre-vis art of the refit Enterprise... the ship is largely dark, save for where she illuminates herself with the various lights all over the ship.

If this were in iClone, I would say alter the Key and Rim source lights, but I don't know how Maya and Mental Ray works, so I'm no help there.

 

[lomitus]

Hey...
I think I keep using the wrong word here with "real" (having the same problem over on the Maya forums). The lighting/effect I'm trying to achieve is believable. Think in terms of shows like Babylon 5 or Andromeda...I don't know which software either of those shows used (Lightwave perhaps?), but I'm sure that even my Maya 2013 is FAR superior in what you can do. I would guess that both of those shows used comparatively low poly meshes (especially B5) and certainly their rendering capabilities were likely limited compared with what's available today, but in both cases, the animation/effects were believable and really helped to sell the shows.

So with that said, yes, I do still have a fair bit of work to do with lights and such...certainly A LOT of tweaks if nothing else (I'm -still- not happy with those bussards), but I'm pretty much at the conclusion that the over-all problem just isn't with the lights or the model(s). I'm almost starting to wonder if perhaps the problem is that the ship looks too good and that's what's throwing it...that I need to "dumb things down" a bit here. After all, I'm still watching those shows on my old 27" CRT (320 x 240 rez), not to mention the original show (NOT the DRM version), was shot on film using the physical models...starting to wonder if there's perhaps something "in camera" there that I should be considering.

In any case, I do have another test animation rendering as I type..needs to cook a few more hours...and once that finishes, I may try doing some physical camera tests...I have some video equipment here, so out of curiosity if nothing else, I'm gonna try and shoot some video of the video....maybe try my old Hi 8 Sony, then transfer it back to the computer to see how it looks. Also gonna look into some other 3D and video forums too...I could start rendering as is, but it's still just isn't the look I want.

 

[martok2112]

Another thing that might help might be a little film grain....which you now seem to have in mind since mentioning your older camera....so, I'm a bit late with that suggestion.

Lots of external video editing software offers film grain as an effect, but your approach will probably be much more naturalistic.