Crashing into the desert 40,000 years ago, a space craft from another galaxy has been dormant ever since. This star-filled night, however, a panel on the hull starts to glow mysteriously… (edit: well not a panel anymore, the whole hull actually )
Hi all,
First post, and first project larger than 2 cubes and a cylinder. I got inspired by the old 1980’s Transformers series, where the Ark crashed into earth, and wanted to recreate a similar scene. I am aiming for ‘massive’ with the space ship, but I’m not sure I’m there yet. I’ve been adding detail to the ship, but also I am wondering whether I’d need to shrink down the foliage to convey the scale. Another issue could be the waves in the water. Maybe a bit more high-frequency ripples to make it look like a larger body of water? Furthermore I’m rendering another version with cane obfuscating the shoreline. Curious to your comments.
All right, I’ve updated the scale of the foliage and changed the scale of the waves. I changed the water shader to have a bit of a diffuse shader in there, but I don’t really like it. I will probably revert to a fully glossy shader.
I’m also not satisfied with the cane at the shore. Any comments/hints/improvements?
Cheers
Removed the diffuse shader in the water, lowered the cane density and added some stray stones in the foreground. Would appreciate anyone’s thoughts what could use improving.
I like this scene and like the surreal feel with the stars.
For me though, it looks like a knife cut a hole in the canyon and the ship was placed inside. That or the ship was built in the location, not like it had crashed. I would suggest adding a lot of debris of varying size. I see you made an attempt at this but it looks just like some boulders laying around underneath.
Also, it would be cool to see some more (lighting) emphasis on the subject in the water. Perhaps move the camera closer, cutting off the left or right side of the canyon (rule of thirds) to show a human looking up at the behemoth that they had arrived in.
Just a suggestion from a fellow artist.
Love your work though, keep it up!
-Ethan
It’s surely a good start, especially if “first project larger than two cubes and a cylinder”
What’s missing in my opinion are the little details as some debris, spaceship elements, more sculpting/displacement to the boulders and mountain sides, etc.
I would decrease the stars brightness, increase overall contrast and maybe add some sparks around the glowing light:
Maybe you can add some fog between the mountains and the sky to create some atmosphere like effect, reduce the number of stars and (imho) most important of all: it’s hard to believe that half of the spaceship is into the rock and there is no sign of an impact. You can think of many consequences of the impact: rock debris everywhere, cracks on the mountain, pieces of the spaceship spread all around, smoke coming out of the ship, etc.
But, as the folk before me said, it’s a pretty good start.
Forms make it look like a galleon or other sail boat with broken oversized masts. That was what came to my mind first after seeing the scaled image.
The scene scale is not apparent. Could use suggested aerial perspective (even though the planet might not have an atmosphere). That would also make the colors less saturated and tinted towards the reflected color of the atmosphere. Ref1Ref2.
Camera is not grounded, foreground texture size (ground on the right) seems similar as it would be small distance away, and the birds look like insects that are viewed above. So it appears like the viewer is a giant, or the scene is very small. The viewer could be far away, but then the image is usually shot with a long lens which makes objects in the picture look flat because the perspective from the actual camera position, plus there is more atmosphere between the camera and the objects captured in the image.
We are unable to see smaller detail from far away with bare eyes. The more distance increases, the more detail we lose. That means that the foreground should show higher level of detail and if you spend a lot of time making the ship highly detailed in contrast to the foreground, you can also make the scene appear smaller and more unrealistic with that.
This is very nice project! Keep it up! What came to my mind is that the ship does not look like that it crashed to that mountain, since there is not any pieces of rock anywhere and the mountain also looks perfectly fine without any scratch. If you think that huge piece come from sky with huge speed and all that energy absorbed to that rock, the place would look more like what it would look like after atomic bomb. All people would’ve of course been killed during that crash even though the ship would’ve survived because of it’s strange material. Maybe they had shuttles to get away before crash?
Thanks! Indeed I would like the mountains/boulders to look more rocky. I had a stab at sculpting them but that went horribly wrong. I essentially create gigantic bubbles everywhere and I just reverted to the height map I started with :(. Some nice cracks in the rocks, as also mentioned by saunam, would definitely make it better. I’ll just have to have another go at it.
@saunam: Thank you for your input, it’s very helpful. I indeed should add spaceship debris! Definitely missing that.
Lol… Indeed I can see it too, now And thank you for that dense amount of feedback, it makes a lot of sense. It’s funny that you suggested to have an aerial perspective, as I had it before and quite recently decided to switch it to a ground perspective (though as you say, that needs tweaking).
@ArMan: thanks for the feedback too! Indeed I need more damage everywhere But people? Who said they were people?
I’ll report back with an update, thank you all again.
@Ethan_Gunter: also thank you for your useful input. “Surreal” is indeed a nice description of the starry backdrop. I personally like them so bright, but I’ll test lowering the brightness as suggested by others.
I like this idea! Nice smoke you got going and I also like the ship design. Simple and effective. My main concern is as mentioned before, the scale, I still can’t quite figure out how large that ship is. I cant for sure tell if the foliage is grass or trees. I think that it has to do with the relation between the scale of the rock details and the foliage and larger boulders scattered. I guess that the dark green foliage is trees by the way but I cant be 100% sure.
hope that helps, I have been following this thread and its nice to see more updates. =) For how long have you been doing 3d and blender?
I rotated the rock in the front and put trees on top. I hope this will make the visual connection with the trees in the back in induces a sense of scale. I’m not convinced myself, however.
And to answer your question: I’ve picked up my first copy of blender in 1999, and quickly dismissed it. It took me until version 2.5 and the discovery of Blender Guru in 2009 to get somewhere. Since then, I’ve been doing very small and simple projects that each time made me figure out a new thing in Blender (mostly scientific illustrations). This is my first scene of this scale, however, and pretty hard for me to do
Stars have a bit more variation and shape. Look up, you’ll see the milky way as a band across the sky with patches
Increase the overall contrast: the sky should be darker, it is night.
Add some color contrast: The red from where the ship is embedded, the brown of the rocks, the ‘blue’ grey of the smoke
Make the ship look like it’s been there for a while: rust/algae on the bottom/sides. I think I went a bit far in this paintover, it’s hard to identify the ship on the first glance.
The ship looks small. There is no way to tell if its a big space ship or not, the nearest reference points are those rocks and rocks to me can be any size so still no solid reference points. The frame is already too focused and it feels like there is no build up in the mind that give you the realization if “OMG look at this big ass space ship that crash landed!”. The lighting also not helping with the visual scene, some part of the casting shadow are not dark enough, moon light doesn’t reach that far that actually let you see green grass, user Mik.a has a good example above where the grass and plants are turning completely black at some patches.
Higher-res render. I think I’m going to focus on adding detail to the soil in the foreground and add more detail to the ship’s exhausts. Then I’m about done with it - either way
And thank you for that dense amount of feedback, it makes a lot of sense. It’s funny that you suggested to have an aerial perspective, as I had it before and quite recently decided to switch it to a ground perspective (though as you say, that needs tweaking).
