Battlestar Hangar Bay & Launch Tubes

[Pearse]

Crikey, didn't expect to see this bumped today. Thanks very much, kborak. I have a finished pic of the Landram in action in my gallery. Might as well put it in here too I suppose.

Uni work's got in the way of this now so I haven't been able to texture them properly or follow up on the tank track tutorials I found. It looks like making tank tracks animated in C4D involves Mocha coding which scares the crap outta me.

[gpdesigner]

Nice Rams . . . . I've seen them before somewhere else, someone named snazz84 or some-such like that . . . . . you should check into it . .
gp

[biotech]

That last picture looks header worthy to me.

[tnpir4002]

All I can say dude is...WOW. That hanger deck interior looks GREAT! And your launch tubes are good too.

Since you mentioned you were having issues with lighting, here's my approach:

The first thing I'll do is work it so that the lighting in the virtual set matches as closely as possible the practical lighting on the real one. If that doesn't look right then I add in incidental lights where needed to make it work. A lot of times what I find is that ambience is the biggest challenge and missing element, but from what I can see you're off to a great start, especially inside the launch tubes.

Keep it up!!!

[Pearse]

Thanks very much, especially for the advice. My main problem has been that I've tried to use all the lights that are on the actual set, but as soon as I switch global illumination/radiosity on, the whole scene becomes very over exposed.

That's probably why the launch tubes look better, because there are far less lights to worry about. But I'm looking forward to tinkering with it once I've got some "proper" work out of the way. I probably just need to tone down the intensity of the main lights to stop them washing everything out and then let the smaller lit features create the depth and interest, which make your images look so good.

[tnpir4002]

I have the exact same problem with a lot of my sets. Let me give you an example:



Now I realize this is a Sci-Fi forum...but this is the best example of a practical lighting setup I have Follow me on this one...what few people realize about this particular set is that it takes over 100 lights on the stage alone to get it balanced and even. According to lighting director Tim Sheldon, the combined luminosity of this stage per episode is more than most people would use in their homes in six months.

When recreating it virtually, I arranged all the proper lights in their proper positions, and set them all to the proper intensities relative to one another. But when I merged the lighting grid into the rest of the studio model, the entire thing was more or less one big white mess. Instead of showing their proper colors, all the props were whitewashed in the extreme.

Knowing I had all the lights at their proper intensities, I decided that the wisest approach would be to adjust my textures accordingly. Look at the above image, and you'll note that not one surface therein is at 100% diffusion. The doors are at 15% diffusion, no ambience; the blue back wall is at 20% diffusion, also no ambience; the walls of the turntable range from 15 to 25% diffusion, no ambience but with specularity maps. In all cases, this results in this set looking very very dark when the lights are turned down even a little bit--and while this has the advantage of allowing me to precisely control how bright an object appears simply by darkening its surface, it makes it very difficult to import props from other projects without significant modifications.

The same can be said of my Star Trek interiors, particularly the bridge sets. The sets are essentially flooded with light, but to look at it you'd never see it because the textures are so dark. In the 1701-D bridge, for instance, if the lights weren't up that bright the walls would look almost pitch-black.

Perhaps a similar approach might work for you?

[Pearse]

I'll definitely have a go with that technique. Galactica's hangar bay walls are almost an off-white colour in real life, so that compounded my problems with over exposure. I saw your comment in your Gallery thread about The Price is Right scene and wondered how you dealt with 100 lights, so it's great to hear the tricks of the trade. Making the textures darker certainly sounds like it'll create images that are more faithful to the real thing than if I started lowering the intensity of lights, or switching them off altogether. Turning off the main tube lights on the ceiling was starting to look like an option, though I knew it would make the scene look less accurate to the series.

This all started off as my first major project in 3D, so it's been a learning experience in all departments, and now I'm seriously itching to get back to it!

[tnpir4002]

Something else you might try if you're like me and want your sets to have every last erg of realism you can manage:

One problem I was persistently noticing with my sets was that the colors never quite looked right (not saying yours don't but just a strategy to keep in mind), so i started taking screencaps directly from an episode or film, blurring it, and then sampling colors directly off the image (saved in BMP format of course) to apply to my models. You'd be amazed at how much more realistic they look when you do that.

[deg3D]

Ah, very nice dude. Gotta love those bays eh.

deg

[Pearse]

Thanks a lot.

Originally Posted by tnpir4002

Something else you might try if you're like me and want your sets to have every last erg of realism you can manage:

One problem I was persistently noticing with my sets was that the colors never quite looked right (not saying yours don't but just a strategy to keep in mind), so i started taking screencaps directly from an episode or film, blurring it, and then sampling colors directly off the image (saved in BMP format of course) to apply to my models. You'd be amazed at how much more realistic they look when you do that.

Mmm, I might try that too. The thing about the hangar bay sets is that they've changed the lighting quite a bit over the years, so that makes everything look different. In the miniseries it was as clean and shiny as a high tech hospital, but in recent years I think they've used filters to give it more of a dirty, greenish hue. I guess I'll just pick one scheme and stick to it.