Work in progress - Patrol 2016 (Part 1)
I made this image in 2002. Part of the models where made by Matt Wilson, part where re-remodeled using Matt's models, by me just to get some tri's away. It's just (another) 'tick' I have, I just cannot stand to see (unneeded) tri's (triangular shapes) in 3D models. >.>All nice and dandy you may say. Yet at some point I started to dislike the image, for one and probably the most nagging thing in this image is that she doesn't really shine. Her suit has this somewhat dull shine over it. It doesn't has this shine as magical as polished latex has. There's no 'snug vacuum sealed' feeling.Secondly there's something 'wrong' with the camera angle, the way the 'pool' tries to cut out of the bottom of the image, gives it a quit distorted feeling.And thirdly I f-ed her face up.Which is the reason why I never went over this image again, which should be easy. Just reload the 3D C4D file, re-render, open up in photoshop, pick up the paths of the final image, polish the girl up and put the 2 together.Alas, something something went terribly wrong around 2002 as for starters I couldn't find the final image nor the 3D file. Which meant I had to start largely from scratch. And with a 'been there, done that' feeling I just left the image and moved on to other projects. Though it didn't completely disappear from my mind.Working on these new 4Forums I looked through my Cinema 4D files & models to see if I could add some nice free 3D models to the download section and ran into the communication tower from Space 1999.Because of some unneeded tri's here it can use another remodel round but this got me thinking back of this old image from 2002 and I for some reason really liked the idea of taking it up again and fix all those things that where nagging me. So step 1: re-re-model some of the most basic Moonbase Alpha shapes. And then just start putting the modules together in a way that resembles (somewhat) the old background.I do modelling, texturing and lighting as I go. It's said you should keep those 3 separate but, meh, it's how I like to work. Going over some research over at Google... I noticed that those light emanating planes are quite different then how I use them above. Just a texture with lumination on a polygon and global illumination in the render settings.You cannot use it alone as light source because of the many ugly artefacts iit creates. These plastic panels aren't emitting light anyway they only pass it through as you can see here:You can see that it are milky-white panels with a large light source behind. Also notice how light fades away to the sides and bottom. Only thing I could find how this worked in reality was an image of a tall wooden pole and 3 bulbs of light on it that was lighting the milky-white panels from behind. Not an option for me here, so I'm experimenting with something else.I made a milky-white texture with specular, reflections and some transparency put that on the panels that let light trough and then behind them, not only put a "real" light but also build a light emitting box that gives some fake impression of some space being behind the walls. Creating a more realistic feeling then a light emitting texture on a polygon.This 'light-box' goes behind the round walls, and I have a similar one square shaped for plain straight walls. This is as far as I got before deciding to put my attention back on the next image I had been working on just before I picked up the idea to redo 'patrol'.
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