A light for all

Hello all,

I am posting this as my second full blender project and I am looking for critiques and criticisms. A couple of things I know are issues but don’t yet know how to fix:

-The light from the lighthouse: I tried adding a spot lamp to the inside of the tower however nothing came out, I even turned up the energy to see if that worked. no luck.
-The ocean kind of drops off at the towards the horizon, not sure how to fix that.
-The thrusters under the ship, I tried to get them to glow as if they were actually humming. I’m thinking I may have to pay with the compositing.
-The lighting: as this is a night scene, I have no idea how to light this. I’m attaching two renders I did, one where I had a lamp just behind the camera so I can see the materials I was working on. And another one with no lamp just showing darkness. I was hoping the HDRI I used would light it, but not so much. Also including blend file

My aim was to show a future scene where a ship comes in and is able to see because of the light from the lighthouse. Really going for a contrast between the natural via the lighthouse and the rock faces, and the sleekness of the ship. Essentially a future rubbing up against real life, where the lighthouse is still there. Any critiques and criticism would be appreciated as I’m trying to get better with each project.



light.blend (2.51 MB)

Update:

I actually added some lights to the scene. I did some research on how to light a night scene and I figured that the scene is really a futuristic light house, so there may be an old lighthouse but also a couple of more futuristic looking landing lights. So I created a couple. Made it a little brighter.


Hello all. I’ve decided to adjust the direction of the piece. Taking the old lighthouse and contrasting it against a new one. Added all the light I needed. This is a fresh render. I’m going to run it through the compositer, add some detail, glows, and a couple filters to make it look more realistic.