It has been a long time so time for an update. i have done a lot of work on texturing (for me anyway) and adding detail, and basically anything that will make it look like something other than a small model. I think it is about finished now, but i’m still trying to figure out what a good final composition should be. Coments and critiques are always welcome.
Well good job mate! Modeling looks fantastic.
as for the composition the lighting is wrong. I mean the station looks like it was copied and pasted onto the clouds, because it is all yellowish and the clouds are not.
Inspiration…
Thanks for the comments DDD,
The ‘yellowish’ came from an atmosphere setting i had turned on. i will have to try rendering it without that and see if that helps. i’m also still trying to figure out the volumetric clouds and the material changes in 2.56.
Yeh it’s definately looking great 
I think it would also help once you get some volumetric clouds happening, that way it will look more like it’s flying in the clouds and less like it’s stuck to a picture of them. Keep it up
I think it’s look great! As noted, there’s the yellowish of the ship and whiteness of the clouds - might be better to just mess with color correction after rendering, so everything is yellowish or white-ish. A note on clouds: I used the add-on cloud generator to make clouds and it works really well on the default cube but I was once trying to generate large clouds - 500x500x250 BU - sort of large clouds. The results were pretty bad. In this case, might be better to make small clouds which look good and render it as a background, then render & composite the ship in, rather than make large scale clouds.
Randy
good work mte
Thanks for the support. Well i switched back to 2.49 for this render. The sky is a texture from Blendercookie with billboard clouds in front of it from Allan’s cloud generator. Let me know what you think of the results.
Looking forward to your updates! ! !
Hey. Good to see you’re back on this project.
Those renders look amazing, did you do them with the internal renderer?
This looks great. Love it. Maybe a little bit too clean:confused:?
Thanks for all the replies.
Black Sage: Yes, i used Blender internal, i have a dual core machine and render time usually comes in at a few minutes although it varies depending on what settings i’m testing.
Volkh: Yeah, i’m not sure about how clean it should be. It is supposed to be a fairly new ship in the British navy, so it should be kept fairly clean and in good repair. Also it’s over a mile long, so any dirt has to be petty obvious to be noticeable. i actually put crew on the deck, but they are hardly visible in the renders i have posted, if you look close you might see them as specks.
Hopefully i will have a new render to post before too long, i had noticed my last render did not have any shadows on the deck a result of the sky dome blocking the sun-lamp. Also i think i need to blend the billboard clouds better into the background; its still too obvious which is which.
Looks good to me. But make another render that is color-graded to the sepia kind of style they used in the move.
GJ Mate!
Thanks DDD,
i have played around with a sepia style render but so far i can’t get it to match up to the movie. the other thing is that it is hard to see detail in the movie renders…
i wanted to go for more action in this render but i’m not sure about the overall composition yet, so let me know what you think.
Too cluttered imo. The attention is drawn away from the manta station by having the fight this close up.
Also you have one fight close and one in the background, so there is nothing in between? unlikely. My advice would be to rethink the composition.
Not sure about the clouds in this one, at least the very top. looks like the clouds are dirty lol. Maybe thats just me ^^
As for the sepia, looks like they have a vignette, with color correction and slight glow. Man I love that effect in this movie 
Edit: Here is my go at it, i think it would be better if the sky was darkened before the compostiting, because in the process the manta station gets a bit darker too… I have a .blend attached as well.
Attachments
Manta station correction.blend (513 KB)
Well it has been a lot longer than i intended.
i was trying this new composition to see if it was any better, but in the long run i think i’m still coming up flat. What i would really like to achieve is an epic feel to the piece, but i’m not sure how to get it…
DDD, thanks for the blend file and suggestions. They did helped me get a better grip on the node composition system.
Great work looks just like the movie!
Thanks for the comment Renderluz.
Update: i’ve been playing around with modeling a spitfire, its not finished yet and i don’t know if i would add it to the scene or not.
Wow! Very Sweet! The movie is also an inspiration to me. I love your work on this. Keep it up!