Touchdown, Bertrand Benoit (3D)

#1

Title: Touchdown
Name: Bertrand Benoit
Country: Germany
Software: Blender

This is my second attempt at creating a relatively broad vista using the Indigo render engine, which I tend mostly to use for interiors and product viz.
The scene was modeled in Blender. The main render was done in Indigo 1.0.7 64 bits. I rendered a few images in Blender Internal to use as masks for the compositing (haze, blur, sky, atmosphere…) in Photoshop. Grateful for any comment.
PS: Credits to Rudolf Herczog and Chris Stoski for unwittingly providing the inspiration for this. I also learnt a lot (or tried to at least), watching their work.

#2

i like the mood.
some nice modelling and texturing, nice composition.
good work!

#3

Wow very good picture.
I like the details and the mood
you put in the pic. And all this
is made with open source software.
Phantastic job. 4*

#4

nice work, i like the colors and the angle, you could add more details.

#5

I love this kind of image really well done !

#6

Good Work … . .

Microsoft Halo type platform . . . … .

Keep the good work up. . . .

#7

Very nice design!! :thumbsup:

#8

Good work :thumbsup:

#9

Well indigo handled this scene very well! Nice result and great work!

#10

Thanks for the encouraging comments, guys. They’re very much appreciated.

#11

it is a stunning work mate, modeling, texturing and atmosphere looks great. Rudy is a great inspiration on me too.

I love how you handled with all those lights on buildings without using a single one. Theoreticly (on Maya) it is possible with incandescense mapping. But can you basicly explain what kind of textures and material nodes to create these building lights ? I’ll be glad…

Thanks in advance and keep up the great work :thumbsup:

#12

Hi Kerem,
For the building’s lights, I first went through the web and collected all night-time cityscape photographs I could find. I then cut all the little lit windows in photoshop, perspective-corrected them, and pasted them into one large texture map only made up of tiny window lights.
Now, Indigo allows you to texture your emitters, which I assume is similar to what you refer to in Maya. But emitters are not materials in Indigo, which means you can’t blend them with normal mats, whereas you can blend as many mats together as you like. So what I did was to select the planes on my skyscraper meshes that would receive windows and separated them into new meshes, to which I applied a textured emitter using my window lights texture map. For the buildings at the back, I used two passes - one with only the windows as emitter, and one with the sun but no lit windows - which I merged into Photoshop using the lighten layer blending mode.

#13

I like the mood a lot, seems really relaxed. I think it would be cool if the blue glow that is in the hallway was some how repeated on the landing pad as a guide pattern for the pilot.

I like the ship design, very Babylon 5 Starfury-ish

Good work

#14

Thanks David. Indeed, Babylon 5 was one of my sources of inspiration. I should have mentioned this.

#15

Great work!

A little constructive criticism could be:
-the shot perhaps looks too clean (lacks defective lighting, spots\stains\rust on the metal, smoke\fumes in the city etc.).
-you could add some extra activity at different depths in the picture to create a more profound depth to the picture (e.g. other flying objects, fumes in distance, specs/dirt on the camera) while keeping the ship in front the main point of focus. Should make this picture even more powerful.

But that just popped into my head while looking at this great scene.

#16

SirValiant: Thanks a lot for the feedback. Your points are very valid. This image would definitely gain from going the extra mile. I think I’m done with the modeling and rendering side of this (the render times with Indigo are loooooooooooooong), but I might return to it to do some additional post-prod work. I think this would still allow me to address most of the points you mention.

#17

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