Major Project - Lazarus - 001 + 002

001

Before starting any new scenes I waited to have a meeting with my lecturer, she suggested to keep refining the 2 shots I had already and get them ready to be signed off.

I had been trying to acquire more/better assets than I already had, I had used a new version of starbreaker and exported it using the blender plugin. In blender the import worked perfectly, all of the materials and decals etc all worked fine. The only problem I had was the .glb export was still lacking a lot of support and would have missing geometry and materials, although some materials that weren't in the original I exported but was still too much work to try and merge both mesh's or try to clean them up, just going to stick to what I have at this time and will re render each shot with updated assets, Although looking back now I could have easily replaced the chair / joystick etc.

I have tried exporting the blender version as fbx, abc, etc. but nothing seemed to carry the material data over. After talking in the 'Star Citizen Modding Community' discord server to the people that make the starbreaker app, they said that the problem was that I had to make the instances real as blender doesn't support star citizens material structure.

I also tried doing some script stuff inside blender to try and fix the problem that some people from the discord server had suggested but that didn't work either.

002

I first started looking at shot '002' as this was a much heavier project and had an insane amount of polygons in the scene. I tried bringing the ocean up a bit so its closer, I was hoping to try and get some of the jets reflections in the water but it was hard to achieve with the camera angle and lighting choices I had already made which unfortunately the position of the sun will need to be consistent as it will be a key object in a transition later on in the scene.

Although I had made the plane a lot smaller to try and reduce the polygon count, there was still a very clear cut off before the horizon line. I didn't want to keep adding more onto the plane so I added a couple mountains into the bg to try and break up the horizon line a bit which I think has worked nicely.

Now that the plane has been scaled down loads, I can start bringing the cloner count down of the clouds. The only reason I had so many is because the plane stretched so far you could tell in the reflection of the water that the clouds didn't go on forever. This also hurt the scene a lot making it very slow and unresponsive and made the renders take forever as well with some renders taking from 15 to 50 mins per frame.

There are also a few clouds that I have separated acting as kind of hero clouds that I have placed in specific positions like around one of the peaks of the mountains and some in the path of the camera either to help give more dynamic lighting with the light from the sun bouncing through the clouds and the flickering of the camera's flare/lens effects.

I have also opted to go from 16:9 to 2.39:1 aspect ratio as I think especially with fast moving objects like cars/ships etc it helps give the impression of speed a lot easier with its wider FOV.