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Creating a -believeable- look for a sci-fi animation
curtis10945
#2
One thing that make it look “non-real” is the perspective.
The ship looks small.
Maybe going by realistic measurements would be a start.
Then materials.
They don’t seem realistic.
The basics are there you just need to expound on what you have.
RHS92
#3
Yes, it’d also say scale is the biggest issue here. It sort of looks like a small toy, at least from the video. It needs more surface details. Adding more details with geometry is probably the best way to do it, but textures could also be improved. Huge objects needs huge textures with lots of details.
I would also increase the focal length of the camera. As I imagine it flying through space, a camera would probably not be able to get very close to it (danger of crashing?) so someone photographing it from a far distance (several kilometers away?) would have to zoom in quite a bit, or use a telephoto lens to be able to frame the photo correctly. So maybe go higher than 300mm? To the point where it almost becomes orthographic.
I’m guessing since you’ve been trying to render with Maya Software, you’re using a standard surface material like blinn or phong. Please don’t use these materials 
They just won’t be able to give you realistic results. Use mia or mila materials. And get some good reflections onto those materials. Put a texture into the reflection-value and glossiness/roughness value, to make the surface look more uneven and less CG-perfect looking. If you look in your video around 0:31, the specular highlight on the sides are too perfect, and needs some breakup.
Don’t use ambient occlusion either. It’s basically a legacy technique that was used to fake global illumination before superior GI-techniques were invented/fast enough to render. Now it’s mostly useful for games and few other areas. Not something you want to use if the goal is realistic lighting. Use Final Gather instead when you’re rendering with MR. It will give you better results, and will also render A LOT faster if you have the right settings.
As for the lighting, I wouldn’t personally use a 3 point lighting for this kind of scene. I would only use it for portraits, interiors, product-shots and this kind of stuff. For renders in outer space, I would suggest only using a strong single directional light, to simulate a nearby sun/star. And maybe use a huge, blue, off-screen, planet-sized sphere nearby, to cast some indirect lighting onto the ship, to sort of simulate the ship orbiting a planet.
Not sure what exactly you are using the depth pass for, but I definitely wouldn’t use it to create depth of field in post. Any noticable depth of field would probably just make it look like a miniature model, in the same way the tilt-shift effect can make photographs/videos of huge cities look like toys.
These are all of course my suggestions, and you don’t have to follow all of them. It looks pretty awesome already. I would love to see an updated version of this some day 
sentry66
#7
maya 2013 still has Mia_material_X - use that along with mental ray. Don’t use Maya software render unless you prefer how CG looked 15 years ago or had some specific legacy toon shaders or something you need it for.
IMO the ship as it is right now probably holds up ok for rendering a far off background ship no larger than ~500 pixels across. Though that’s assuming you’d at least use realistic shaders and linear lighting workflow etc. To me the shading gets too dark too quick to look natural, or maybe the shot is too dark anyway.
IMO there’s nothing wrong with using ambient occlusion for tiny texture details, but NOT as a primary shading tool to simulate huge shadows. Using AO with a really small distance is fine for bringing out tiny details if you have actual tiny structures modeled into the ship for some close ups. Don’t use it to attempt to shade hundreds of meters of distance across a huge ship, especially in space where ambient light is not very strong in the first place.
I agree about leaving out the depth pass for space shots.
If you were going for a more realistic look, the surface is going to need a lot more modeling detail. If you model the ship like it’s a simple shape, it’s going to look simple. If you start extruding polys or scattering small rectangular cubes to act as individual panels, then you’ll be on the right track. Get up close and render some higher res shots and it’ll quickly become apparent simplified the structure is.
ralphymeijer
#10
A couple of things I think will help and some are mentioned before:
Create a more direct lightsource. One direct one and one fill light. Match the lighting with the environment. Your background is very blue, however the lighting on the ship is plain white. Never use white lights, no light is pure white.
Add surface roughness by adding a bump map. You say in real life you would not see this. This may be technically true but you “feel” the detail. Sure if we see a football field from a distance we don’t notice the individual strands of grass but it does contribute to how we perceive things.
Make the environment reflect in the ship. There is totally no environment reflection happening.
Good luck!
curtis10945
#12
The perspective does seem closer but…
…the ship looks like it’s getting fake lighting.I’m sure you know that but you’re going to have to add the sun to light it and /or the ambient light from the earth.It will have to match the lighting the the back-plate(earth) is receiving.
If you’re going for a realistic look,that is.
You could put it in a different scene to match your lighting you have but I don’t know what.Maybe a maintenance bay or something.
Just my two cents…
InfernalDarkness
#14
In my opinion, your lighting scale here is the chief culprit. Remember that Maya/mental ray uses a real scale for the light falloff (quadratic), and trying to fake it will yield precisely these results, especially in combination with old shading models such as the Maya legacy shaders. Remember that the Enterprise is really quite large, and thus, those running lights would have to be very powerful. 3-point lighting in space? Where are the other two lights coming from? You need to light it based on what’s actually in your scene, not some arbitrary imaginary lights, to achieve some realism. In local space, you have one massively bright entity (the sun) and then several far dimmer entities (planets, other stars) which compete with it. You need stark blacks, in the shadows. Your planetary lighting should really only change the color/tone of the ship, not the intensity. Even localized the Earth doesn’t emit that much light, compared to the sun.
It’s all about lighting. Example:
Also you’re doing yourself no favors by ignoring the mia_material_x_p. It’s the shader you should be using for mental ray pre-MILA shading techniques. It will solve fake highlight issues and give you far more flexibility, as well as often rendering faster and allowing for built-in pass support.
Cyberone
#16
Ive been following this for a few days basically wanting to post the same as others…
You have had some posts from some of the leaders in the CG industry…but it seems you are set to your “vision”
Ill just leave this tutiorial here:
Warning!! EXPLICIT LYRICS!
InfernalDarkness
#18
At this point we’ll just assume you don’t know what “subjective” means. How things look in space isn’t subjective at all. It’s a simple matter of nearby emissive physical objects - objects are “objective”, you see. If it were subjective, that would mean the viewer would be emitting light at will and controlling the other emissions with their mind alone. This is not only false, it’s physically impossible. The sun doesn’t actually care how badly you want it to emit more or less light, or which color spectra are being emitted. Try it. Try turning the sun off with your willpower.
You can roughly calculate the lighting based on their emissions directly and easily. This is called “physics”. Light falls off at the quad precisely because it’s emissive, and emitting bodies in space are spherical. It’s not rocket science. It’s regular science.
sentry66
#19
So in the end, you mainly just brightened the lights up?
IMO, I still think linear lighting workflow would've given the ship and it's shading a much more natural look, but if incorrect shading gamma is considered a style then it doesn't matter.
The modeling panels idea was just something to quickly utilize existing topology to extrude and bevel some details/grooves that would then react to light as a quick way to add richness to the shading. I can't imagine the model density would get as out of hand as you think it would. Surely it wouldn't be anything some basic scene visibility management couldn't handle.
People always are quick to define how the human eye works and relate it to fixed/finite resolutions saying you can't see things. Working in the medical field, I actually have worked with vision researchers and animated some of their findings. If you look at how VR research is recently shaping up, we're now starting to see some of that published reasearch materialize into how VR rendering prioritizes resolution sampling towards the center of the eye - which some people are now saying should ideally approach 16k density at the center of focus.
People do see tiny contrast details, especially in highlights and especially if they're dynamically changing in reaction to light. If you couldn't see any of the ship panels, then why do you have the texture-mapped panels or lights in the first place?
It's too bad no one's suggestions here have been useful so maybe thread was a waste of everyone's time. I understand you're going after a more stylized look though, so I'm glad you figured out what you needed.