While experimenting with certain painting techniques, I planned to either photo-manipulate or fully paint my compositions towards my model sheet and final piece. Moreover, I found both practices very difficult when it came to perspectives and hard edges; to show the scale of the ships.
Here is my first variation piece. I wanted to capture both the positives and negatives to the colossal floating container ships set in a dystopian future. One example of this is in the foreground, with the decaying 'ordinary' ship been left for scrap while the other soars over towards an ever increasingly bleak horizon; an overpopulated earth.
While struggling to find the best perspectives/atmospheres, I was at the same time modelling simple ships in Maya, to produce renders that could then aid me and I could then paint over them. Above is the result of one of these, following the same composition and angles. I enjoyed playing around with the depth and thickness of the cloud obscuring the giant ships structures.
I experimented with several settings to get the best mid-day sun effect for my third composition idea I had (using the rendering feature mental ray in Maya).
I placed a blinn shader on some of the ships to get a chrome effect which reflects nearby shapes as well.
This is my third comp I did. I really enjoyed playing about with brushes and forming hard light with the sunny environment. The image depicts the launch of one of the largest anti-gravity ships (AGS) and perhaps the last hope of transporting hundreds of tonnes of goods for humanity.
After changing the weather and time of day in the previous comps, I wanted to try a night scene (of which I have never painted before and also posed lots of small challenges). Keeping the same perspective as before, I wanted to show in more detail the exterior environment such as a working dockyard setting; which could then be used in a games setting/map etc.
To make the lighting seem more vivid and cinematic, I created my own lens flares in Photoshop following an anamorphic example. I was able to make this in just five minutes and think it added a bit more character to a few of my pieces.
After speaking to a fellow student, I was suggested to play around with light in a global mental ray ibl setting (skylight & environment lighting). This required a little trial and error with nodes and attributes in the editor, till I was able to place in a HDRI image which acts like a global illumination, for the scene I would then render.
Here I have the render settings I placed on a low final gather and quality, to get a quicker result that I could then just keep tweaking to till I was happy. As I continued with this however, I realised I was not managing my time in the best way I could and decided to just go with a fog and area lit rendered comp from earlier.
Overhead, is two attempts I tried with lighting the night scene. I wanted to give an artificial mood with the large fluorescent tube lamps. Although I spent quite a long time 'testing' and not using the features for my final ideas, I think I have gained a lot more knowledge independently with rendering models in mental ray and hope to go back to this in the future.
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