Battlestar/Stargate


A giant space based Stargate with a Battlestar emerging from it which takes up an orbit around Earth.

I wanted to change the size of the panels which hold the symbols on the stargate, but found out I would have to start from scratch to do it. So I will just have to live with them being on the small side.

Thoughts, comments and any criticism on how the image looks and the composition are most welcome. Thanks for looking.

Excellent imageā€¦

But shouldnā€™t the surface of the portal be a silvery liquid, not transparent as you have it.

But either way, as I said an excellent image.

I love the texturing on this - great job!
If Iā€™m being critical I would say that the light coming from the right hand side is too bright - not sure what that would be coming from. Always difficult with a space scene because if you were doing the light ā€˜properlyā€™ there would be no diffuse light at all, just the light from the Sun (which is coming from an ā€˜incorrectā€™ direction if Iā€™m in mega-pedant modeā€¦) and any emitted by the gate itself. It would be interesting to see what it looked light if you were harsher with the lighting.
I always have trouble with this because you spend so much time creating these cool details that you want to be seenā€¦

@ davidh7426. Thanks you for the comment itā€™s much appreciated. You are right about the colour of the portal, I had it so there was no transparency at first, then I got to think what it would look like if the back of the Battlestar was sort of semi visible as it emerged from the gate. Not close to how the gate works in the tv series, but then again the set up of the image is all rather different anyway.

@ lordgert. Cheers for the comments, theyā€™re always appreciated. The lighting comes from a HDR of the Milkyway, without it, and with the sun being on the far side of Earth, there is very little light to be had. So I end up with a rather dark image.


I think I will play around with the position of the hdr and see what happens. Must admit though this dark version does look rather ominous, though it does tend to kill off most of the detail on the models.

shouldnā€™t that be a ā€œsupperā€ gate and not a small planetary gate ?

think the Ori

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Yeah thatā€™s a bit much isnā€™t it. What about light coming from the gate itself?

@ JohnVV. Yes it is more of a super gate as created by the Ori but with the look of a planetary gate.
I am running though all the old episodes of Stargate at the moment, as I missed many of them first time round a lot of what is going on is new to me. So I only just found out about the Ori. Quite a nasty bunch they appear to be, and Iā€™m sure one of them is the smoking man from the X files. He certainly gets about.

@ lordgert. Thanks for the suggestion about light coming from the gate. I tried an emission shader on the portal, but that was a non-starter as it looked terrible. Tried using the daylight side of the planet as a backdrop but the gate and battlestar were still mostly in shadow. I also used a mixture of different sun and spot lights but the only thing that looks half way good is the Milkyway HDR.
I guess trying to light space scenes is always going to be a bit of a compromise between what looks realistic and what looks good. And I guess good will mostly win the day over realistic.