Carrara Challenge #19: Above and Beyond - WIP Thread

evilproducer

Hi Chickenman!

You've got this cool blue nebula, but the lighting on DS9 is pretty gray and uniform. Is it to late to add some complimentary lighting? perhaps add a bluish rim-light or something to suggest the illumination of the nebula? You could also put the sun-light at a more oblique angle to provide some shadows? Doing so will also allow the glow channel "lights" used on the space station and star ships to show better as well as provide some more drama.

This render of the Cygnus from the, Black Hole has a primary "sunlight" which is a simple Distant light, and opposite it, to provide underlighting I've added another distance light with a violet color and a lower intensity. I've also lowered the scene's ambient lighting to around 10% or less, and set the color chip to a bluish color to provide a little fill.

The rest of the illumination comes from lights within the ship, shining through a shader with translucency. They are also the light source on the clouds near the ship.

FifthElement

What the hell, just realized yesterday I have bit more time before I move for a second image, this is gonna be a quick one cuz I modeled this before (like 6 months ago in Silo), probabably gonna take forever to render on my secondary machine (4 CPU only) ...

Here is few screenshots, Cararra one is with multiple instances and textured already (mostly quick procedurals from my own library) 

chickenman

evilproducer said:

Hi Chickenman!

You've got this cool blue nebula, but the lighting on DS9 is pretty gray and uniform. Is it to late to add some complimentary lighting? perhaps add a bluish rim-light or something to suggest the illumination of the nebula? You could also put the sun-light at a more oblique angle to provide some shadows? Doing so will also allow the glow channel "lights" used on the space station and star ships to show better as well as provide some more drama.

This render of the Cygnus from the, Black Hole has a primary "sunlight" which is a simple Distant light, and opposite it, to provide underlighting I've added another distance light with a violet color and a lower intensity. I've also lowered the scene's ambient lighting to around 10% or less, and set the color chip to a bluish color to provide a little fill.

The rest of the illumination comes from lights within the ship, shining through a shader with translucency. They are also the light source on the clouds near the ship.

I will play with it still to see what i can do.

i have already 8 Distant lights in it maybe i i blay with the color of them to more of the blue and white of the WormHole and dial up the  one that is actually casting shadows a bit more.

Just have to watch that i don't over power the space ships like i was earlier as they were almost glowing white they were so lit up.

 

Thanks for the tips.

FifthElement

Here is the "color" render, no post, off to play with it in Fusion ...

Astronaut from free NASA 3D objects page (not rigged, so it is what it is, lol)  

evilproducer

chickenman said:

evilproducer said:

Hi Chickenman!

You've got this cool blue nebula, but the lighting on DS9 is pretty gray and uniform. Is it to late to add some complimentary lighting? perhaps add a bluish rim-light or something to suggest the illumination of the nebula? You could also put the sun-light at a more oblique angle to provide some shadows? Doing so will also allow the glow channel "lights" used on the space station and star ships to show better as well as provide some more drama.

This render of the Cygnus from the, Black Hole has a primary "sunlight" which is a simple Distant light, and opposite it, to provide underlighting I've added another distance light with a violet color and a lower intensity. I've also lowered the scene's ambient lighting to around 10% or less, and set the color chip to a bluish color to provide a little fill.

The rest of the illumination comes from lights within the ship, shining through a shader with translucency. They are also the light source on the clouds near the ship.

I will play with it still to see what i can do.

i have already 8 Distant lights in it maybe i i blay with the color of them to more of the blue and white of the WormHole and dial up the  one that is actually casting shadows a bit more.

Just have to watch that i don't over power the space ships like i was earlier as they were almost glowing white they were so lit up.

 

Thanks for the tips.

The lights are cumulative, so if you have a lot, you may need to dial the intensity down. Another possibility is the scene's ambient light. It defaults to 20%, which is quite high. You could try turning it down or off to see the effect you get.

evilproducer

FifthElement said:

Here is the "color" render, no post, off to play with it in Fusion ...

Astronaut from free NASA 3D objects page (not rigged, so it is what it is, lol)  

Very nice! If you don't like the astronaut's pose, you could break out the ol' bone tool!

chickenman

Here is the one with more blue from the light behind the Worm Hole.

And here is one with 2 other lights on that side set to blue as well but i found it to much.

evilproducer

I agree about the blue being to much in the second image, although I like the contrast between light and dark in that one.

chickenman

With the first one you get the sutle hint of blue on the Galaxy class ships but non on the Klingon and the Defiant has a nice line from the shadow Defiant. 

Going to try on emore with out the ambiant.

MarkIsSleepy

Worked a little more on my second image today- I replaced the outfit, played with the textures a bit, and made some changes to the hair including adding a duplicated hair with a bit more wave and some frizz and a little bit of wind blowing.  The wind is just a low powered force that starts at 1 second and goes for 1 second and I just scrubbed back and forth in the timeline until I found a spot where I liked what it was doing to the hair, then rendered just the current frame.

The face came out a little too deeply shadowed in this one so I added a bounce light to light it up and am running a final render now which I will probably post tomorrow assuming all comes out well.

chickenman

One last try.

 

FifthElement

evilproducer said:

FifthElement said:

Here is the "color" render, no post, off to play with it in Fusion ...

Astronaut from free NASA 3D objects page (not rigged, so it is what it is, lol)  

 

Very nice! If you don't like the astronaut's pose, you could break out the ol' bone tool!

Sorry, no time for me left, I wish I had more, like I said, packing my stuff as I speak, moving in a week 

Anyways, here is what came out of Fusion after some fiddling with few extra render passes, kind of happy with it, so i'm gonna leave it at this point, maybe i'll render it when i move in higher resolution with posed astronaut and more replicated ship sections ...

This is my entry No. 2  

evilproducer

Oops! I forgot about the move! Good luck with that! It can be great moving into a new space, but the move itself is usually hell.

MarkIsSleepy

I think I'm done with my second entry.

Straight render before any postwork and postworked version:

MarkIsSleepy

I forgot to post the before and after for my first entry too, so here's that.  Render straight from Carrara and final postworked version:

Varsel

Here is a draft render of a poosible enviroment for my flying racer.

The air-boye is also created in Carrara.

The way I created the blured propellars on the flyer and the Air-Boye, is to make a disk, UV-map it, and then use the black&white image in the alpha channel.

For the color, I used a Color gradient, with a radial gradient. I found that the colors "sold" it better.

Diomede

 

 

Thanks for the propeller tip, Varsel.  Looks excellent.  Glad to see people usng the time to get a second entry in.  I'm still doodling.  For no apparent reason, I decided to model a giant alien predator bird and an alien landscape.  It is fully rigged and ready for flight.  After uvmapping, I used the 3D paint tool to paint a texture map for the fur (yes, alien birds have fur, not feathers).  I also made some custom flowers/fruit for the alien plants.  It has that Rankin and Bass look. 

 

bigh

now thats different

evilproducer

I have an idea for this one. We'll see if I have time. Hours at work have been insane and stuff keeps piling up in the non-Carrara world.

Diomede

The entry thread has been opened here.

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/61815/carrara-challenge-19-above-and-beyond-entry-thread#latest

 

There is still a week to participate so keep those WIPs coming.

evilproducer

Hmmm.... So i reply to this thread and stop getting notifications? Love the new forums. Yippee!

Anywhoo, in honor of CBS launching a new super hero show this fall, I thought I would do a super hero render featuring the subject of the show. Any guesses? ;-)

First up was adding a V4 Super Suit thingy to the scene and working on the textures. I wanted a look similar to the promo images I've seen and from the recent Superman films. I used the bump map from AoAs free Carrara ring mail shader. I'll see if he still has it, and post a link later.

For the rest of the shader, I used a color gradient and fractal noise shader to give some subtly variations in the suit's color. I also have the highlight a bit brighter than I normally would for a clothing item so that the AoA bump map shows up better. As the scene progresses and I light the scene, I may need to change it higher or lower depending on visibility.

Next up is the skirt for the suit. I'll probably look at some of diomede's wonderful clothing tutorials and model the skirt in place, as I can't find anything I like in my product library.

Stezza

evilproducer said:

Anywhoo, in honor of CBS launching a new super hero show this fall, I thought I would do a super hero render featuring the subject of the show. Any guesses? ;-)

I did have a dream this week.......

 

evilproducer

Well, S.O.B. !!! I started playing around with clouds and uber-large (no, not a D|S product) replications, and I put Carrara into zombie mode. Not sure where I saved it, so I'll open it tomorrow and see how much work I need to do. Oh well, there were some elements I wasn't that happy with.

Bunyip02

evilproducer said:

Well, S.O.B. !!! I started playing around with clouds and uber-large (no, not a D|S product) replications, and I put Carrara into zombie mode. Not sure where I saved it, so I'll open it tomorrow and see how much work I need to do. Oh well, there were some elements I wasn't that happy with.

Hello EP, hope the gremlins stay away next time and let you finish V4 Super Girl, looking forward to seeing your render.

Regards, Bunyip

evilproducer

Mostly some shader work was lost and some modifications on a skirt. No big deal, as I lost less than I had thought.

evilproducer

I'm going to use a couple items of clothing that are close to what I want for the character, but aren't quite what I want because of added geometry.

A good example of this is the V4 Hooded Cloak. I was hoping for a separate shading domain for the hood that I could apply an alpha shader to, thus making it invisible. No such luck. Carrara versions prior to C8.5 have a fun little bug in the vertex modeler, in that if you select polygons on a rigged model, such as a DAZ figure, and then go to View--> Hide Selection, the selected polygons will also be hidden in the Assembly Room view and your renders. This is what I'm doing to hide the hood on the cloak, thus creating a cape. I will also do the same for the skirt.

Unfortunately, this bug was squashed in C8.5 and later. It's a shame, it was one of those rare, useful bugs.

evilproducer

For the skirt, I'm able to use, Select By Shading Domain, under the Selection menu. I need to hide multiple domains, so I need to use that menu option for as many domains as I need to hide. Unfortunately, you can't use the menu to select multiple domains at once. Once all the domains are selected, then it is just a matter of View--> Hide Selection.

Note that sometimes the shading domain names aren't that descriptive, so if you have a lot of them, it can take some trial and error. Also, sometimes there are unintended consequences for hiding parts of the mesh, such as holes in the mesh. In this case, I lucked out.

Headwax

so good, thanks for sharing the method!!

very sorry I havent been active on this  thread.

here's something i worked up, carrara painter 2015  and a handful of other programs

 

I modelled the kite all by myself ....

 

MarkIsSleepy

@bigh - just FYI, you have your entry labeled as #1 but I think it should be #4 

 

bigh

MDO2010 said:

@bigh - just FYI, you have your entry labeled as #1 but I think it should be #4 

 

does it matter ?

you got me !