I modelled the ship in Lightwave, and then composited everything in After Effects. Basically I shot the video first. Color corrected it. Then I lit and animated a scene with the spaceship. Then I rendered a black and white shadow mat. Then I combined them all together in After Effects.
Looks good! My only complaint is that the ship moves too fast -- it looked fairly large, so you expect a somewhat "exaggerated" takeoff speed, instead of just floating off the ground so quickly. It looked a bit cartoonish.
Other than that it was very good!
People shouldn't be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.
OutcastJiob wrote:Looks good! My only complaint is that the ship moves too fast -- it looked fairly large, so you expect a somewhat "exaggerated" takeoff speed, instead of just floating off the ground so quickly. It looked a bit cartoonish.
No way that was perfect speed, if it went any slower it would look all.....crappy. Nice job though.
Ewwwww....... is that a bit of Covenant on my helmet?
Thanks for all the comments. I think I'm going to lighten up the ship, and bring out some of the highlights. I think some sound will help account for the motion of the ship. A nice struggling whine of the engines firing up. I guess I forgot to add the lights on the engines. I also need to add some other layers of effects to get it all working together. I'm thinking about trying this trick and make the camera oh-so-slightly shakey, so it doesn't look so still. It looked good on an overexaggerated test shot.
Now to see what I can do with this steady cam I just built
Its good work and if you want tips to get it totally realistic here are some that i use often.
Since you are usingt Lightwave you should use a plain white skydome to render the global illumination onto the model and bake it to use as a diffuse map. This saves having to have radiosity on for all the renders.
Also theres nothing interesting about the ship to suggest how it is powered. whether its rockets a weird glow or blue flames just like starwarz lol this just gives the imagery some dynamics instead of a flat rendered thing in a locked down shot.
Also you could look at some luminosity maps to make the ship look like theres small windows or extra detail just to break up the model a bit more.
the shadow is good and if you want to improove how it interacts with the environment you will need to add real world phenomenon like maybe some dust or some grass beinf blown about just something that affects the environment to suggest its realism.... maybe even birds flying out of the trees when you turn the ship on.
uhh lets see.. use a light blue light from above to simulate the blue light from the sky hitting the ship. but also dont make the light too bright or the contrast in the shot will look off.
remember tho if your render doesnt look right when you export it dont worry if you have compositing software you can tweak it... lightwave automatically exports alpha channels in its movies. so even color correcting both layers would be possible
thats all i can think of now other than i was going to say the movement... use curves in your animation using graph editor maybe you do already i dunno but it will get the nice acceleration animation when the ship rises of the ground and takes off because i agree it needs to look heavier.
aaronv2 wrote:Its good work and if you want tips to get it totally realistic here are some that i use often.
Wow, thanks. Those are some good tips. I'll have to give them a whirl. I might try some of those on some othe renders I do in the future. I'm going to add an engine glow and some dust/heat distortion effects as well. I'll probably tweak the motion, cause I'm getting a lot of comments on that. Motion is f*** hard to get look right.
And ya, post processing the image is always a must.
thats cause its a science and an art all mixed into one... and science usually ruins art haha
Muzzle Flashes, Bullet Time, Lightsabers, Buffy Vampire Effects, War Films.... Ahhhhh!
[img]http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y224/aaronv2/bashed.gif[/img]
