sorceress21

Thanks for the solid feedback, its all VERY helpful and yes, this is far from a finished product. Render time was about 8 hours.

Overall I'm going for a realistic lighting setup vs. a pretty one. The one thing I don't do with my art is practice presentation for the sake of aesthetics. In sci-fi I feel strongly there is way too much of that which spoils suspension of disbelief. For example putting a magic light source on a ship in deep space which is common place and nearly standard. I mean space is a dark place. The best IRL lighting setups I've seen in sci in my opinion have been 2010: The Year we Make Contact and The Expanse. Also look at the many images out there of Starfleet vessels inside the spacedock. Those images the ships all blend in as well and in my opinion are some of the best realistically lit scenes in scifi. That being said one thing I've going to play with is to add spotlights in the dock to better illuminate a ship that is "docked" like those spacedock scenes from trek. I'll play with global medium to get the beams to slightly show up a bit though in a vacuum unless there was dust or a gas present that wouldn't be present IRL. But one could say it was some kind of venting from the ship's ECS.

So yes, the ship is blended with the dock background a lot I agree. However, that's what it would really look like. The hull of the Destroyer is also non-reflective and has a sprayed on thermal coating. That's knocking down the contrast quite a bit.

Now along with the main dock lighting which I already know how to fix (I think), the big work lights definitely need help too and definitely look too CG insofar as the structure. Right now I'm not sure how to go about fixing it so idea are welcome. They are not just in how much I need to adjust the projected light but in the texture of the surfaces, especially the tube rails they're mounted on. I may just do away with them and go with something else as they are heavy poly anyway.

This scene is actually meant to sort of show the ship about ready to depart which is why all the running lights are on and the work lights are dimmed and turned off where there are no other ships docked.

Mesh build is far from done but a good chunk of the core model is complete enough for a render test. I'll do a fictional scene write up when the dock is finished.

Modeled entirely in SketchupPro 2018. The mesh here including the Okuda Class Destroyer in the scene is nearly 20 million polys. There are only two displacement maps, one in dock wall texture that appears between the long "rail" structures and upper Dock overhead and one in the Okuda hull texture. The Test scene was rendered in Thea Studio in 8K with slight post-work done in Gimp 2.0

Main gangway airlock details..

I'm not super happy with this render but I wanted to show the ship lit like it would be if it were all real. In TV and film especially artists tend to vastly overlight spacecraft as if there is some magical light source that always conveniently exists. Space, unless a craft is in direct sunlight from a local star is a very dark place. I'm really not happy with the moon. it came out really flat. It's actually a to scale sphere that's modeled in the same scene yet for reasons I don't understand there's no sense of depth.

I'm taking a sabbatical from work and have had time to really pounce on the Okuda to finish off the exterior. I've done a fair amount of detail work and have addressed the shoddy textures.

Some narrative that will be included in the final prints that explains a lot of the external structures...

"The Okuda Class Heavy Destroyer, although an extremely successful design was rushed into production to meet the defense demands of the threat imposed by The Unity. The vessel is so over-powered that dissipating the heat and EM signature and structurally compensating for it's high sub-light velocity and maneuvering capability of the ship required an abundance of additional systems. Many of these compensatory systems had to be placed partially outboard due to the shear physical space demands of the equipment. Heavy structural integrity field generators, EM dampeners, degaussing field emitters, heat exchangers and heavy shield equipment all have disrupted the sleek outer hull with exposed components. Many of these components are equipped with self-contained defense field emitters to add a secondary layer of protection against combat damage if adversary fire is able to penetrate the primary defense shields."