Lighting pic

[gmd3d]

Hi all I have here a picture and I am playing around with the lighting.. As tou can see on the Livery ship the refection of the Galactica can be seen and the Vipers are only
seen because of the engine glows..

what do you think

[rjandron]

A good start. But I noticed a number of things there that you may want to play with.

1. Your star, I assume, is a basic lens flare. One of the drawbacks of using simple lens flares as stars is that they don't look like they actually occupy much by way of volume, like an actual star would, nor do they really give much of a sense of intensity. A quick trick to do this in camera is to place a small white sphere with 100% luminosity behind the lens flare source. The lens flare should blend over the sphere, creating a light with some volume. Failing this, use the sphere, and place a lens flare over it in your image editing software.

2. Try shifting the colour of the lens flare to a bluish-tinge, or a whitish tinge. This should give the impression of more heat and intensity, and it may blend well with the neblua that you have in the background. Generally, the hotter something is, the whiter it glows.

3. It looks like you have a secondary light source in the scene other than the star, which is creating some illumination on the livery ship at right angles to where the light source should be coming from.

4. One of the tricks of Babylon 5 pioneered by Ron Thornton was to use "realistic space lighting" -- a single, highly directional light source with harsh shadows, with the ships being silhouetted by a bright background such as a nebula. You may want to play with the nebula to see if you can cast the ships in more of a silhouette. In later seasons of B5, they kind of took this overboard with some shots having the nebula too bright and blowing out the silhouettes.

5. The engine glows have a harsh termination--you may want to play with making them softer by increasing their glow radius or diminishing their glow amount.

The combination of ships heading towards/past a distant star is a good composition. I'll look forward to seeing this WIP evolve.

[gmd3d]

Thanks for the advice rjandron I have save your suggestions and will
work them out tomorrow I think I can down load a Star from LIGHTWAVE GROUP V3 where I am also a member..

Thanks again

1: The Star is a lensflare I will go with the sphere .
2: Lens colour will be changed in the next pic and see what happens
3: There is another light source other than the flare... (your good)
4: have to try that
5: Glow amount will be changed

T

[Titon]

Taranis, lightwave 8.3 has it's own starfield generator. Look for it in modelor.



Also expandiing on Rj's words remember the basic's of lighting. Enjoy the lighting tree.

3 different lights to illuminate your scenes.

1. key-Main light source-sun
2. Fill-Secondary light source-usually positioned opposite of the key light with 50-75% intensity. Don't overshadow your key light.
3. Kick-Spill lighting from underneath or behind your objects. This can be the nebula with the color spillage onto your ships.

Now this all depends on your situation of course but it's a good guidline to follow. Play with that and see what you can generate. All scenes take different lighting so don't be afraid to experiment. Ya never know!

Good luck

[gmd3d]

A common phrase us by a Homer Simpson comes to mind, Doe!!!!!

[Darrell Lawrence]

Taranis, on that initial Lightwave tutorials page I sent you a while back there is a section for lighting.

There is a tutorial there written by mine and Don's friend Kier Darby.

That is basically the tutorial Don pointed out above. Check it out.

[gmd3d]

I have been reading them and have made ajustments its getting better

[doomer]

If you could see the vipers it would be better I think

[gmd3d]

Your right doomer. I have to get back to this picture soon and fix's the lighting ... thanks for your input .. I work on it

[gmd3d]

Welcome to the fleets doomer ..

[doomer]

thank you

[kapollo]

I thnik You could add a viper somewhere in the upper right corner, or a planet in some distance, because that space looks a bit empty.

cheers
kapollo

[Spike The Cylon]

I like it lots!

[gmd3d]

here its is.. a bit brighter perhaps to bright..



I had a pc crash and my plugin files have not been restored to their proper place.. I have tried to restore and reload but thay are not where they should be. It must be a confic problem can anyone help

[Cinnamon]

I like this version a lot, Taranis...

The engine glows particularly from the Vipes and the Cylon Tanker look good. For some reason the Battlestar's engine glow looks a bit flat, or washed out to me, but I don't know enough about all this yet to really say why. But the composition is good, and I like the background a lot. Really nice work.

-jaime

[gmd3d]

Thanks Cinnamon and your right about the engine Glows ... it can be fun working on the pics but time consuming and lights is the most time consuming of all the set ups.... but it also makes or brakes the final pics.. The Galactica was done by a member here "Stevew" very detailed model....like lost of power I have post a few new pics if for galactica TOS if you want to look..
ger

[Stevew]

T here are some great plugins for glows
http://www.alienskin.com/prod_index.html
S

[gmd3d]

Hi Steve .. how are you ..

[Stevew]

Working off site gives me very little time so I lurk a lot before work

[gmd3d]

ahh got you.. any new projects ??

[Stevew]

Just finished my version of the Daetalus from Stargate, only have weekends to work Hope to get texes on it this weekend, should be 800k polys or so
Must head off now, keep up the good work
S

[gmd3d]

cool Stevew . I hope to get it in LIghtwave .. good luck