The buildings all look blue gray off white to me.
If you make the Fed building the one that is pure white, with blue trim,
it will stand out. It can be reflected light, part of the problem with the Tal Shiar. In blender one way to deal with that is put up transparent planes that will block reflected light. I can try that on the Tal Shiar, along with some other tricks, to reduce my washout. Slim had suggested fog in the render. Washout does not really get you to a fog look so I will work
on cutting that in the next version.

There's a reason why the CGI guys for tv shows/films do multiple passes with various lighting conditions, and put them together... compositing or something.

Lke for ds9, they filmed the model for a single image, in show, of the station almost 30 times, or something.

Each time, only *1* light or set of lights were used per pass... for instance, the windows are lit for the pass... then the power core, then film ambient light, then film no ambient, instead, sourced light... Why else do you think they much preferred CGI when it came to the Dom War?

sure, CGI at the time couldn't half do a decent Ent-E ramming the scimitar, it could only enhance it, thanks to the upside down real model that got shot into a scimitar model, and the resulting debris established at the very least a baseline for the cgi guys to model and composite in some more debris that is indistinguishable from the debris that was in fact real during the film of that....


And that sentence was too damn long.


Even today with pure-CGI stuff, they do multiple passes, and something with instances...
then composite the images together to produce the photo-realistic pictures of trucks that then turn into a huge frickin robot... but then thats transformers. The truck and the initial stages of the transformation look photoreal, but then we have no idea how 'real' it would look, for real, on the rest of it... since the trucks were 'standins' so to speak, while the robots were just CGI and the actors had nothin cept one of those reflective balls to talk ta.

I know it's not Star Trek, but I've got the DVD of the 2004 Phantom of the Opera film. One of the extras in the DVD is how they did the scene where the Opera House transforms from its' run-down state and goes back to its' glory days, with the dust blowing off all the props and the chandelier rising back up to the ceiling, and so on. It's an incredible scene, but it was filmed by doing lots of different camera passes with different effects, and then putting them together.

The video is On Youtube.

Kenneth, I've just written an email to Slim so we can find out what it's supposed to be before I go on

As for the image, I wouldn't use fog, not currently anyway as that'll only make things worse as fog will flatten the colour of an image out. I recommend using some radiosity (though I don't think that the blender engine can do this, but Yafaray can and it integrates with Blender nicely)...
Actually, I've just taken a look at Blender 2.5 alpha 2 and it's got some radiosity options. Though I don't recommend using it as it's an alpha still

As for compositing, I can't image a CG shot getting to the screen that hasn't been through a compositor first. There are always tweaks to be made and it's great to do them in real time - you don't want to re-render the whole scene because one light is lightly too bright or something.

To show you how even straightforward looking shots always require lots of tweaking I've attached a screen capture of the comp of my building shot:


And this is from a single pass image (an all-in-one render) and when it comes to combining multiple passes, thing can get hairy.

If you want to break things out into multiple passes, just create your scene as normal, then save out different versions of the scene with lights turned on or off, etc. and save the image to a different file. You can then put them all back together in Photoshop or whatever. Fun times!

Radiosity has been a blender feature for some time now.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:M ... /Rendering
I will play around with it.

First, I'M STILL ALIVE.

Let me just let you recover yourself after that.

Second, i've been reworking my scene based on slims new drawing.

This is all very early stuff, the lights need adjusting, the cannons need modelling and texturing and i still need to add people. I'll update you as i go on.

Ooo, nice. Shows you how well I know Blender
It'll significantly add to your render time, so keep settings as low as possible to begin with.

Edit: BTW, I don't mean to be bossing anyone about. If anything it should be the other way around. Feel free to tell me to piss off

Yes, we will try to recover Corny2x. It looks like you are
making good progress.

It is all very helpful. I put in lot of time on the model but rushed the final step. Your suggestions help me to rethink it.
It is a fan game so there is no boss. Mike is the closest thing to a boss. (I guess that means we can tell him to piss off?)

Corny2x, you have done a nice job of reproducing Slim's layout. It does make the image look even more interesting.
I look forward to your refining it.

The radiosity had an unexpected bad side effect. It washed out some of the
other special effects. See what happened in the pit. (bottom image)

I did use some features from the render but also reduced the intensity
of the transporter effect. I also cut down on the amount it washed out
the rest of the image. See the second photo. This is a reduced version.
The full image is on SharePoint and sent to Mike.

On top is a first version of the background for the Romulan Senate.

And about me being the "boss" of this. Think of me as a coordinator just
because I have been here so long. What makes this game work is the
people. If I do bossy and drive off the talent we are lost. My greatest
hope is that the playable version of this game will attracted even more
talented people. When we do start going to the cons to talk about
this the real story is about the people.

The layout is progressing for the Romulan Senate. It is rather close to what Slim did but not totally.
The Senate building will be on the foreground pedestal. The ring walls are in place but
a great deal of work will be needed to get the surrounding city and monuments to the 2560 x 1600 resolution.
That will fill in and extend to the mid ground.
The sunset / sunrise colors are coming along.

Very nice, I would just recommend a different blending for the clouds(ones over the moon and Remus), they look little unnatural, maybe if you reduce their opacity or feather out their edge.

Good point. I will see what I can do.
It is funny though to altering a photo image texture to look more real.

Does one of these look more like what you had in mind?

They all look great, and most people wouldn't notice something like this, but only light passes partially trough clouds, so the clouds over the stellar bodies should be fully visible and hide the parts of the bodies under them.

few reference images:

Most of the time but no always. It depends on the lighting and more
on the kind of clouds. (See moons below)
Let me try to play with the sky image and
more opaqueness in the sky plane.

It looks like the model with image texture is
not the place to correct all that comes with
that issue. I should be able to do a better job
in post production gimp / photoshope.

Looking good. One thing to note when progressing is the shadows on the mountains - they tell you where your key light (i.e. the sun for this system) should be and hence how shadows should look on all other objects in the scene.

Easy solution: "It's a binary system."

I would use sky2. Good luck

Easy fixes, all good points, thanks guys

- Still working on the Romulan Senate Diplomacy backdrop
It is slow growing with a lot of detail work.
I am experimenting with the sunset lighting.
This is just part of the lower half.

Very nice work.

Yeah, it looks fantastic.

Now we know where flying saucers come from. It was actually the Romulans all along.

Great work mate, this is going to be an awesome scene in the game.

Ooooooooo, I like it! Bashir

Sorry it's been a while since I've updated, but job type things keep getting in the way.
Anyway, I've done some more modelling, including the foliage around the Fed building and lots of work on the glass.


So I need:

• People
• Ships - I still need models for all the ships if people can find them. The Daedalus model's I've found are all crappy, plus I need shuttles and various other ships.
• Some material variation in the other buildings? I'd like feedback on this. At the moment they're all plain white looking and some variation would be good but I don't want to detract from the Federation building.

Dafedz has awesome Deadlus class... http://www.trekmania.net/the_fleet/utop ... edalus.htm

Can buildings be little whiter or maybe you could increase light intensity little bit?

No download on the site...guessing a email is needed?
Plus I still need the other models. Probably from the very early era as the Daedalus is an early era ship right?
It'd be cool if the images change as you progress through the game



Yeah, colour correction can be done after the render, but I think I'll brighten the whole thing up a bit

Nice progress. Did you find a place to download plant models or did you make them yourself?

Models:
It looks like after you click on the 3d Model in that link there is an email
address link at the bottom of the page. You could show him your work and
ask about shuttle models as well. I do recall some shuttles at battleclinic.com.
I can not check on them from work though. They also made it a lot harder to find the models on that site.

Material:
You might also try dulling down the spec and hard and darken the
color on the non Fed buildings. Ambient occlusion is another way to fuss things out
a bit. Doing the reverse on the Fed building material should make it stand out.