Yup, you’re right about the color. Anyways, changed a few things, mainly the bumpmap which is now a simple procedural clouds texture(cellnoise). Found it to match the plates of the blizzard’s one pretty nicely… it might me just me in the end though 
Anyways, here’s the render:
This time it’s rendered in Yafray(16x AA,HD format). C&C is welcome, positive or negative, especially on the lightning.
Looks awesome! There is an absences of stars though… I like the night theme though! You could probably have more lights on it though, looks a little sparse atm. Great work though!!
About the background in general - I don’t know how to enable it in Yafray(I guess I’m dumb as hell or smt). Otherwise, I’ve got an yellow nebula background ready and it looks pretty good for me, but the internal engine messed up the bumpmap so I switched to Yafray… Anyways, I’ll google this problem now
Why are you using Yayfray for this rendering. You can get it rendered in internal too… propably faster too. 
Allright, here’s a render with the internal engine. Same camera angle, added background, changed light energy to 2.0 and changed the normal value to 10(was 2) because you can’t tell that there’s a bumpmap otherwise. Here’s the render:
Two things that are bugging me:
1st - check out the wings, the engine section and the hammerhead(not the sideplates or the bridge). Something is wrong with the colors(I’ll check this out again… last night I was too sleepy to do anything about it).
2nd - the bump map ain’t as good as in Yafray. That, of course, might be just me
About the rendering time - about the same as Yafray.
P.S. looks like I’ve forgotten to change the material of the engines themselves…
You cant use exactly same lighting settings on internal and yayfray in most cases. It takes some tuning, but trust me you can get quite a lot out of the model with some light tweaking… . also. .why it is gray?
About the color - well, it’s a warship, after all Also the battlecruiser from the cinematics is gray all over too(actually some of the plates on it are rusty, and there are a few logos, but that’s all).
Actually i ment space…
Oh, I tried to simulate an nebula with a yellow-ish tint…
Hmm. Doest work that well. :S
Check this site out. Maybe its of some help…
http://www.ap3d.com/betterspace/
Well, I know that link, but thanks anyway There’s a tutorial somewhere in this forum with this link in it.
Right now I’m exporting/importing some meshes to see if that’ll fix the bumpmap because with the same material it only looks like this on the wings/big parts of the ship(the size might be a problem, but I kinda doubt it ^_^).
EDIT: Ok looks like the import/export thing failed…
EDIT2: The wing was made out of a plane, then its material was linked to the other big parts and it looks like the planes don’t like bumpmaps… my bad.
Allright, since I couldn think of anything to add to the ship, I decided move on with the scene for it (the 1st one actually, I’ve got a couple of plans for the model, however some of them require even more modelling, for example, one of them involves a space dock). It is still in a very early phase, however this is simmilar to how it should look in the end:
The scene is called “Tarsonis Aftermath” and I’ll have to “destroy” the city a bit to match the real aftermath, as well as making a better sky(and sun). C&C is welcome.
Rendered in the internal engine with no AA and AO set to 3 samples, if you’re wondering why it’s full of noise.
this looked great when I first saw it, and it still looks very cool. It’s a bit of nostalgia I guess, but I really love this.
one of my favorite unit in StarCraft. How about a Siege Tank next time. just kidding
One of the scenes that I’ve planned:
Terrain - Mar Sara
Scene - Battlecruiser in the sky with wraith squadrons passing by, dropships deploying tanks(now you know that I’ve got some plans for it ) and goliaths, Camera shooting near one of the tanks, directed to the sun… something like that. Anyways, that’d take some time to finish as currently I’ve got only the battlecruiser and the wraith finished…
As for this one - I think I will leave the battlecruiser alone so to preserve the atmosphere.
Allright, here’s a new version of the scene. Mainly changed the blocks and the background. Also added credits just for the heck of it. Here it is(1600x1200 warning):
C&C welcome as always. Hope you like it
See a few cool things you can add. Not sure if you fixed the lights on the hull, since I never saw a later render of them. The little square ones, you can set the materials there to be emissive and they will light up the hull nearby, making them mesh with the rest of the ship much better.
I’m working on a solution to this next issue myself. On anything on this planet manufactured with metal plates on the surface, you will see one of a few things:
- Bumps from the inner surface of the mold used to cast the part.
- Grain boundaries that are stretched over the surface from rolling or forging the part.
I’m trying currently to get a fast workup for adding some panels to my own spaceship/fist that should be on the forum pretty shortly. The panels, being rolled individually, will have changing anisotropy at the panel boundaries.
To achieve this look, I’m planning on using some sculpting and normal displacement textures to create a normal map and then UV’ng the panels on by folding the mesh back and forth across a single set of panels wherever I want the edges to be. Depending on how well it works, I’ll try and apply the method to the whole thing. Hopefully I can get them to follow the topology well and get a very organic shaped spaceship to have that manufactured look to it.
I’m setting my personal bar at trying to recreate the very nice looking Gallante style from eve. Ships are absolutely gorgeous.
On second glance, I might be able to one-up the methods used. There are some interesting changes in the shimmer at panel boundaries, but hoping I can push the envelope a bit.
How did you do your engines? I haven’t even gotten started on some nice glowing plumes on the end yet. Really curious since yours are already looking nice.
Aha! Knew I was picking up on something. Here’s a better screen that will give you some ideas on how to use your normal maps to create really suite looking ships.
http://ccp.vo.llnwd.net/o2/www/newsletter17/screen_01.jpg
Not everywhere, but in just the right number of places, a panel will have a small amount of pucker in the surface that does not correspond to the pucker in the adjacent panel. Result is that the normals across the seam do not match up quite right, creating a nice incrementing of the lighting, making it look like the ship is most definitely constructed of separate panels.
Second trick is to mimic what happens to metal that is under stress for a long time or was manufacture with a low precision technique (armor often is since it doesn’t really accomplish much to worry about the surface finish or dimensional accuracy). There will be displaced areas on the surface where the panel’s lighting drifts slightly from what you expect from the topology of the ship. A slight amount of pucker in the normal map will achieve this…I hope.
Going to test it out on my ship ASAP and post the results.
I suppose you wouldnt want to share that model. I would like to test some lighting on it perhaps…
Is that your real mail in your profile? Waiting for confirmation
Oh, and P.S. do you want only the battlecruiser or the scene too? (the scene is the simplest thing possible but anyways)