This was my attempt at a more stylised spaceship render, worrying less about realism and just trying to make it look as epic as possible.
Rendered with Cycles, and edited with Affinity Photo to add the smoke and lens flare.
Spaceships like this are always harder than I think they’re going to be to do well; when the shape can basically be anything imaginable, it’s difficult to actually make it look like a spaceship!
It’s also a lot harder to light effectively. I definitely cheated with this; there are about half a dozen area lights placed strategically around the ship and planet, even though in real life the sun is the only light source in outer space.
See more of my work on my instagram account, @taliesinriver
Hi!
The first image, with the lens flare, is really striking!
The planet Earth is also very well realized. May I ask how you achieved the aura around the planet?
Thanks! Glad you like the images.
I made the atmosphere glow (aura) using a larger transparent sphere around the Earth, with a layer weight node and colour ramp controlling an emissive node. I also used a gradient texture to make the atmosphere only visible on the daylight side.
That’s the basics, but I added a bunch of other tweaks and details which made it a pretty complex node setup. I made it into a group though, with a few simple inputs, so that makes it a lot easier to use.
If you want it, I keep it in a .blend file in a google drive folder for people to download, along with a couple other node groups I’ve made.
Here is the link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1tVjLrSzwjX-31YBHn6VluhxceGo-z4Zr?usp=sharing
