Secret mission -- endless engines entry

[scifi_worlds]

I am really excited for this challenge because it doesn’t require a prominent character and much prefer vehicles over characters.
Here’s a preview animation in eevee:

and some more stills in cycles:

(the last one was before I started compositing)

I am either going to add two ships in pursuit or make this one jump out of hyperspace, I can’t decide. I also want to add a pilot using a greenscreen if I have the time this weekend.

I need some help with the lighting and texturing. the ship blends too well with the background, which is good as a spy spaceship because it can hide, but bad from a presentation perspective because the ship should stand out.

[sozap]

That’s cool !

Indeed the ship blends a bit too much with the background.
Here is a paint over to test some stuff :

The eevee preview is so dark that I’m not even sure I get the ship’s silhouette right

I must admit that I’ve done heavy changes, that while looking at them makes me want to dial down all that again.

First I added some depth and direction to the image. background is darker and on the front there is a soft flare like if there is a sun nearby.
This helps the eye to navigate from left to right.I think the flare is stealing too much attention from the ship, so that’s probably something I’ll revisit, but maybe when the ship is moving it’s getting more balanced again.

Then there is more hierarchy, the asteroids were lighter than the ship and therefore draw more attention than the ship, but given the way the image is framed the focal point is the ship.
Maybe you can have only a few of asteroids that are brighter, so they don’t completely disappear,
That’s probably something I went a bit too far with and that deserve tweaking and experiments.

We need to make sure the ship reads well, having that kind of thruster energy behind makes sure we get it’s silouette clearly, but this can be made in a more subtle way with lighting only and/or fog.

Finally , I added some little trails, like star wars stuff, it’s like small particles that goes very fast. It helps emphasis the perspective and give some direction to the shot. It can be something to test out, it works because the image is still but when it moves…

Also I think you can add more variety to the asteroids, they looks very similar , same shape , same size.
What could be cool is to make like a gigantic one, that takes nearly the size of the frame, far behind ;

And make sure you have a good variety in size and if possible in shapes :

If you have fewer of them in the foreground, then it will be easier to create greater sense of depth,

A few references worth studying to go into that direction :

And that’s it !

Keep up the good work , once the overall readability is fixed you can start to look into what stuff you can add to make things more epic and cool ! you seem quite close to this stage !

Have fun !