Doing this scenario project for a final class task and i am looking for feedback in what i can improve even more on this scenario?
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The first things that came to mind were:
- add depth of field
- add some volumetric effect
- the dunes have too sharp edges
- add some footprints
- man on the right has weird left leg pose
- add sand raised by the wind here and there
- if the ship is a star destroyer ‘clone’ then it doesn’t look gigantic as should be
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I dont know how i can change the dunes sharp edges because i followed a guide that used a plane with textures voronoi for the sand and it didnt seem to mention about the edges being sharp
You need an atmosphere between the planet and the moon, right now the moon looks like it’s just about 20 feet away
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The spaceship also looks out of place, there should be some marks around it to show that is crashed into the ground, and it should be better lit, and clearer that it is a spaceship.
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You need to pay more attention to the illusion of atmosphere in general, using a sky shader doesn’t suffice.
Regarding that planet in the sky: when the moon is visible at daylight next time at wherever you live, pay attention, and try to capture that in your render (for a start, the dark parts remain invisible, they are as dark as space after all).
Using a volume to simulate atmospheric effects would help too, best vary density (immediately above ground: maximum value, decreasing with height).
You can try to break shapes in the compositor, using blur filters.
Regarding the characters: both appear to be out of balance, caught in a pretty unnatural pose. I know what you want to achieve, however that doesn’t work right now. Have a look at walk cycle poses, and try to match your characters up with them; pay attention to hip and shoulder rotations counteracting the mass shift, the arm positions, and don’t select identical poses for both characters.
Pay attention to create believable depth/distance between the two as well, right now the one to the left appears to be a dwarf walking alongside the other guy.
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Just to verify, are you using a bump node in your material? Does this disappear if you lower the bump’s distance?
By default the distance value of 1 is way too much for sand. If everything is modeled to a realistic scale, a value of 0.01 or even less should be more realistic. 1 will attempt to shade the surface like the bump is 1 meter deep and this can cause shading errors that look just like this.
Yes I am using a bump and it does disappear . With the bump change at 0.01 it is like this . I rendered at way lower samples to be faster so i could show how the sand looks now
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That dwarf part was really intentional since the left guy is a alien model i got from mixamo.Could you explain me a bit more what you mean by break shapes in compositor with using blur filters ( I am kinda new with the compositor ) . For the planet you mean to do something like this right ?
.
Used this nodes for the atmospheric effect and got this result atm , changed the position from the big man aswell .
Can someone help me out with creating the daylight moon effect of the picture ive shown
Some depth of field would go a long way- the atmosphere blurs things at a distance, even to our eyes- the moon in your reference doesn’t have any sharp edges. You could do this with compositing but I think depth of field would be a good thing generally here
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So focusing on the big guy with the camera depth of field and some F-stop would do the thing ? I been doing some research with the footprints and watching tutorials but still having some difficulties in finding in a easy way how can i add those into the scenario
Just my two cents; do not take too serious:
So… final class… ever heard of: Reference !
Well in times of AI it’s hard to find some references when using a search prompt like : two people walking in desert with building and moon in background.
Okay… this one seems to be without preview…
But maybe this…
The people made their marks… and also the dunes are not totally smooth (execpt this is snow… with some special taint… 
)
Also when looking in the direction of the sun… i guess you can’t see the enlighted moon this way… (also slighty different mentioned by @Helmut_S ).
except there is a second sun (and because of this this planet is that wasteland…)… but then the two “heros” would have a very very severe sun burn… when not deadly… (even in snow…)…
Another point: the wreck… no further debris… okay smallers parts are under the sand (snow)… but nothing more ??Also no broken pieces or holes ?
And the smaller guy/girls,robot (?) seems to be only scaled ( ever saw this creepy “children” which are simply downscalled addults ??) … and (s)he is tilting…
The two fighters are maybe placed right because in the sky alone they would not be visible… but then also there is not much interesting in the sky; like the lense flares in the reference for example… or like for example in this (also never a sun and a moon in opne picture):
I’m not very good in composition… but when drawing some lines into this… where does this lead the eyes of the watcher… ( the most mentioned tip and the mostly not explained one ) What’s the story?
Let’s take a trip under the moon to the pyramids which in the cold light of the day which we also have but is not that cold show us, it’s some alien ship. ( I didn’t mention Star Dest… to not get in conflict with Dis… 
)
( Especially when looking at the context of this ship… this already has some association… so what’s the story ? )
And finally i’m asking myself: What’s does the doctor in his surgery clothes doing in the desert ?? Oh… it’s the Doctor who pun indended came just out of his Tardis !? ( Then of course the heat is just temporary pun indended… )
( Okay i’m getting a bit silly now 
)
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Yes.
But pay attention regarding light direction: in your shot, there’d be only a thin crescent visible. Tried a quick overpaint:
PS:
also try to give the dunes some more texture, some small scale wind ripples would work wonders here …
PS:
I reckon I’d move the characters closer to the foreground, maybe even closeup - like a view over their shoulders, for a greater impact. They look somewhat lost in the image, design-wise.
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Maybe dyntopo sculpting could work? Can be used to add lots of resolution to a small part of a mesh.
Your moon doesn’t look realistic because it’s in front of the atmosphere. In real life, the gradient of the sky would be completely in front of the moon and obscure it partially. This one is difficult, I can’t think of an easy solution that would look perfectly realistic. You may have to modify the rendered image to get the right look.
The most realistic way to do this would be to set the sky completely black and simulate an actual atmosphere with a giant volumetric scattering cube. This does requires some understanding of rendering to achieve, but here is my attempt. Though with this method, you couldn’t have the moon right next to the sun, it would get lost in the halo, which is realistic.
atmosphere_moon.blend (1.8 MB)
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How could i achieve that moon effect you just did ? It looks really cool .
Would something like this works for what you mentioned about the character position plus the wind sand ripples ? ( I used a different shader for the sand )
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The problem you are having with the moon is that its shadowed side is receiving blue light from the sky. In real life, the moon is outside the atmosphere, which means that its shadow is almost perfectly black, with only a small amount of light coming from earth.
Unless you want to do it the complex way like I did, you may be able to cheat it by using a flat image of a moon crescent on a plane. Do a render of just your moon alone on a black background, like this:
Then apply that render to a flat plane in the sky using this setup:
This will make the moon crescent appear transparent over the sky, which will look the same as if the moon was outside the atmosphere.
Here is a file where this is setup.
moon_fake.blend (1.4 MB)
The sand texture is nice, but you should use a way to break the repetition.
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This positioning of the people do remind me of that old monster movies where the stop animation happend in the background and the people run in front of it.
( 
…Maybe because they simply projected this in a cinema and run planlessly in front of the screen ??? )
Just another half cent
Ojh and @Helmut_S : nice overpaint.
Yes.
The easiest way to get rid of texture repetition would be procedural textures, a simple noise texture will get you pretty close.
How could i achieve that moon effect you just did ?
Sample file attached.
desert-and-planet.blend (937.3 KB)
PS: procedural shader used for the moon; of course you could go much simpler and place a 2D image plane featuring a suitable texture
somewhere …
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