Fan art

I got burnt out on rendering after spending 3 days straight trying to get earth to look right and failing so it's been a while... I whipped this up a couple days ago when I found a good map of Jupiter and wanted to put it to use. Fun fact: if you're modeling planets, especially the gas giants, make sure you make them the right shape. It's easy to just slap a texture on a sphere and say good enough but the oblateness actually makes a big difference, albeit visually subtle. Jupiter's polar axis is around 93% the length of its equatorial axis, which is a pretty significant difference actually. It's not super obvious normally but if you put a perfectly spherical Jupiter next to the correct one, the oblate one looks way more correct.



Anyways, here's a gunship being engaged (by a cutter, maybe?):



Not the most polished render ever but it was fun to make; it's pretty easy to get a satisfying result in terms of emulating the weapons.

Nice! Is it possible to circumvent the precision issue by scaling everything down (models included)?
Also it would look better if tracers had more of a forward glow IMO.

Yeah I agree, the model I used for the tracers (wasn't getting a good effect using particles w/motion blur like before) actually did have this feature (imagine two pyramids with the bases touching, but one is 300 meters long ), but it got hidden when I applied the glow. I'll have to tweak it.

I know I know , I haven't touched it since I made that post, because I spent so long on it without getting good results and burnt myself out. There's a complex interplay between the color and density of the atmosphere and the color of the surface, so the surface will look right but then I'll improve the atmosphere and the surface (viewed through the atmosphere) then looks too white (especially when trying to match the shades of the ocean) or wrong in some other way. I'll definitely work on it further and post when I get some decent results.

Actually a glow gradient could work as well if I applied the glow using a mask, I'll try that if I can't get good results the other way. Usually I just change the geometry since the glow intensity is partly based on the visible glowing surface area.

I've been out of the habit of modeling but I've become addicted to it again. I tend to binge with things like this and then get burnt out and drop it for a while unfortunately

I've switched to Blender from 3DS Max since I only have a student copy of Max and I figured I might as well learn how to use something free and avoid getting in trouble if I made some cool animation and wanted to monetize my video on youtube or something. At first I didn't like Blender because it lacked some tools that were important to me in 3DS Max (namely non-destructive editing and particle nodes) but it's really an awesome piece of software and also has a huge community which means if I ever get stuck I'm always fewer than two or three google searches away from an answer. I've been learning a ton doing animation, which I'd never really done before. Here's the short scene I've been working on, it's only about 10 seconds long and unfortunately goes pretty fast but it's a lot harder to make test renders if it takes 45 minutes every time I'll probably go back and slow it down when everything is done.

Full screen it so you can see the cannon impacts :^)

Critique and ideas would be appreciated.