Pre-flighting the Valkyrie by DapperMan
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Description
On the deck of the carrier Prometheus (CVS-101), rookie pilot Ever Seiyama (no relation to a certain future idol singer of mine), does a last pre-flight check of her already thrice-inspected Valkyrie variable fighter. The Prometheus and its mother ship, the SDF-1 Macross, find respite in the ocean after fighting their way through the Solar System and back to Earth.
Based on the anime series Super Dimensional Fortress Macross. Fans of the show may notice part of a certain famous squadron far in the background.
All vehicles and props built in 3ds Max from drawings by Shoji Kawamori and Kazutaka Miyatake, Haruhiko Mikimoto (mechanical and character designers of the show), and from various navy websites to fill in the technical blanks. Pity I didn't get to show off the detailed cockpit that I spent 3 years building intermittently, or indeed the rest of the deck of the Prometheus. Her pose was a compromise between staring blandly into the wheel well, and grabbing lewdly onto a protruding object to give it a good yank like real pilots do.
Rendered in Vue 6 with much finagling; postwork to cover up some bad joints in Photoshop. The whole environment is a render, it's not set against a background photo. Never again will I attempt something so computationally costly until I have my own render farm. Had to stay offline for almost a week just for the extra processing power!
Comments (9)
originalkitten
Excellent composition!
ElBorja
Well, let's go for the critiques. First, I have to say that my first thought was: WoW, the foreground scene does not look realistic enough for the real background used... until I noticed the background is not real, it is a render too. I must applaud for it. Problem is, the foreground scene has a bit too much aliasing to look as real as teh background. Might be your compression used. And it would be nice if the main character was not facing directly the camera, because the spread legs show the limits of that kind of character and the joints of the legs look awful in that position. Apart from that little aliasing and posing issue, I think you have it all good: composition, lights and colors. Keept it up!
thecytron
Xcellent rendering!
DapperMan
ElBorja, THANK YOU for the crit. I stared at this for so long, I missed the glaring detail of the joints. Joints now fixed even more in Photoshop. Aliasing due to the fact that I no longer have time for 12-hour renders... (2.5 hrs had to do for now).
Sivana
From my point of view it looks great!!
Rutra
I see the amount of work you put into this scene. And it looks good but, IMHO, it doesn't show your hard work as it deserves to be shown. The "goodies" here are very far away, lost in the background, whereas in the foreground we see some objects which could be improved, like the flat green shirt of the guy on the left, the too smooth trousers and boots of the other guy on the left and the joints of the girl and aliasing already referred. It gives me the impression you were already so tired of working on this image that you neglected these details. I understand that feeling well. It's a pity, because these details are so visible that "hide" your hard work. Regarding render times, I find it hard to understand why this scene takes so long to render, as you said. The only "heavy" thing you have here seems to be the clouds, all the rest should render pretty fast (there's no transparency, no reflections, no displacement mapping, no hypertextures, etc). It seems you dont even have soft shadows on and, as referred, even the anti-aliasing is not so high, so what is it, I wonder, that makes it so slow? Could it be that you are overdoing on some settings? For example, did you decrease the "quality boost" in the light tab of the atmosphere settings to -1 or near? Maybe these tips below helps, it sure helped me in the past (sorry if it's too obvious for you). http://users.tns.net/~mwalter1/Vue_Render_Settings.pdf
DapperMan
Major limitations were time constraints, the slowness of my PC, and inexperience with Vue (should have mentioned this is my first real Vue project). I appreciate the tips, and no, they were not obvious to me!
DramaKing
Close her mouth to aid the idea that she is concentrating.
Yotna
This may just be me but her pose when I first saw it made me think I was seeing a super-hero. I thought she was holding the aircraft up I think its the power squat that does it - puts too much potential energy in the body. Welcome to the wonderful world of vue - By the look of this you will get a great deal out of it - very nice render.