So I've wanted to do some pictures set within the Four Years war in the TOS aesthetic ever since Discovery came one.
Got three ideas for pictures but it's a matter getting the stuff together for it, at this stage my lack of texturing skills is whats getting the way of finishing this.
An Andorian ship weaving through a destroyed city in the fog.
Explorers older and new. A ship in the starfleet museum style and a FASA Destroyat.
A listening post near the Klingon border.
And here's where the WIPs will go.
Posts
I look forward to seeing where you go with this.
Yeah I liked your model, thought I could use it as the transitioning point into the FASA style models for this mashup of the two.
I've just bashed this together quickly, but here's what the Marklin could look like taking up some SFM details. Already its more palatable I reckon.
I think the ship was intended to have a ugly box secondary below the struts and the saucer giving it that strange top down. Somewhere there was a small game piece version of it but I could not figure out if it was contemporary to the FASA game itself. There was one in the sketchup lib that looked pretty good. I cannot find the pewter model anymore as there are tonnes of images of the Marklin class now vs just a few yrs ago.
Anyhow your take is looking good, want to see what you do with the bottom as that area is the stumbler of this design.
That listening post made me grin, lol. Maybe cause it just screams TOS in it's simplicity.
Texturing a couple of unwrapping tuts should help, focus on surfacing as I got by for ages on procedural maps, or projection maps for details on the hulls.
Regarding texturing, i'm pretty inspired by what Donny's done with his TOS ships though that probably would be difficult to do without substance painter which i'm now looking to get a student license for.
I'll probably take a shot using scifieric's methods in photoshop in the meantime and figure out how to do the additional PBR maps.
And also heres my first shot at compositing anything spacey with an EEVEE render.
Are there any particular tips to getting more realistic lighting other than tweaking the exposure?
What I do, is to use an HDRI image for my wip shots and set up my materials with that. They need to look good in a real world setting. If you get that right, then you can do the space lighting and it should work out of the box.
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Also, are you doing your entire compositions in Blender? While that's certainly possible, it's not necessarily going to achieve the desired results. Using a blend of 3D CGI and other software like Photoshop/GIMP can provide a less limiting set of tools than just sticking to one program. What I would actually do (not saying it's "correct," just what I like to do) is render the ship with no background in Blender and save the render to a RGBA .png image, then add the background and any other effects in GIMP. (or Photoshop, if you have it) I used to do all of my comps that way for space shots, as I found it was the best way to achieve the results I wanted.
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