Out of Pod Experience

It took me about six months of not playing EVE, and instead studying Blender and Gimp (both are free open source CGI and Photo-editing software) to be able to render my first visually appealing and fully textured space scene.

Charon & Station



It is amazing what you can accomplish with all of the free time that not playing EVE gives you. For those of you that are interested in this sort of thing, this image was rendered in Blender 2.6 with it's surprisingly powerful cycles engine. It took about 2:30 minutes to render on a 580 Nvidia video card.


I am posting it here to get some critiques from people who actually play eve and look at eve artwork.




My Own Personal Critiques

I cannot do Alpha channel lighting yet. If you notice everything is dark. There should be lights on the ships and lights inside of the station's docking bay. This will eventually be achieved with alpha maps and improved lighting techniques on my part.

ATM I think the Charon looks as good as what is in game, and perhaps just a smidgen better. I would like to go further with the ship's realism by enhancing something called a displacement map. That will basically make the etchings in the ship's hull deeper.

I want to also learn how to paint dirt, wear and damage onto the ship using gimp. Then i want to add that to the previously mentioned enhanced displacement model.

Last but not least, I want to be able to paint a nice space background, instead of just a generic star field.



One thing that all of this has taught me is that no matter how far you go, you always want to go a little further Six months ago I would not have believed that I would have been capable of something like this (while ship spinning), but now all I see is how it can be improved upon. With any luck, a year from now I will be banging out some high quality (and non-eve related) work.




Thx for your comments.

Thx that's some good advice. Wow at that pic, I guess something like that can be my next benchmark.


I don't suppose you know who made that do you?

As soon as you said that I knew it was a still shot . I'm also guessing that you had it on a lower quality. For my capstone I actually spent 11 weeks physically designing my own spaceship and many of the renders would take 15 minutes which I would end up scrapping because I didn't like some aspect of it. Eventually ended up with a couple of nice angles and around a 30 second video that took 7 hours to render.

My own critique on my project is that the video went faster than I expected it to which turned my centrifuge into a carnival ride and for some reason the shadowed side of the ship became invisible so you could actually see the background. The timing I have figured out but the invisibility issue still eludes me. I think it may be lack of textures because those didn't transfer over very well but I really don't see how that would affect it.

For dirt and damage many people usually just take a picture of the substance and then apply it as a bmp to whatever surface they wanted it as.

Lights aren't too hard either. You can pick free light (to expand in all directions) and set it to a light hue on very low intensity (like 5). Then shift-click to make copies or instances of each location that you would like a light. I don't know if Blender does MR Sun but throwing that in from a distances will give you some great shadows.

Well, as I have no idea about the technical aspect, I'd go with improving the composition. Aesthetically it's not a very good image, but the good thing about CG is that you can always have another try.

If you want to increase dramatism and accentuate the ship's size, put it considerably closer to the camera and shoot it from below. I'd also experiment placing the station a bit farther away and in the center, and hiding a bright sun behind it so it is backlit; with a planet reflecting the light on the lower third of the image it should look pretty epic.