The Star Patrol Wants You! by theSea

DAZ|Studio • Science Fiction • posted on Feb 02, 2009

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Description

Hi, thanks for looking in. This is a bit of fun that started out as an attempt to enter somehting new in the DAZ Studio guide contest over at DAZ. As things worked out it wasn't needed (thanks to those of you who voted for 'Broken' among other things) and I would not have been able to render this according to the rules anyways. It's interesting how things evolve. This started out with the center figure (whom you may recognize from "Future So Bright..." with a wardrobe change) but she wasn't carrying the image, so I brought in Maj Cache, but then it wasn't balanced. So I brought in the Liquid Knight character on the right. Still something missing. Aha! Giant Robotic sidekick. Now it has a group dynamic. Production Credits: "Liquid Halo On Sky 16," "Major Cache" and "Liquid Knight On Sky 16" all by Uzilite and available @ DAZ. I played with the materials on all three outfits a lot, but I felt the default textures were perfect for the kind of mood I was playing with here. I believe Major Cache is holding the gun from Uzilite's "Hardcore." Center character is wearing textures from MaskEdit's "Mask's V3NaturalSkin #5" available here, with Kozaburo's free "Short Hair." Facemorph is a freebie by A__ Robot is "Link" from theAntFarm availabe at DAZ. I worked on his materials a great deal as well. Foreground setting is "SkyDeck" and background props are "Greeble City Blocks" both by Stonemason from DAZ. Also visible are the free "Skytraffic" props by Stonemason. The pwSurface2 shader was used on all of the foreground elements. The steel parts of the robot benefitted particularly from the ability to do blurred reflections - these are time consuming, especially rendered at high quality, but look great. Lighting was LightDomePro2 by Dreamlight with a custom sky created in Vue. There is also an omArealight off camera to the left providing some bounce lighting off of the building. I also rendered a high res shot of the background in Vue and comped that in over the skydome... even with a 8000x4000 skydome the background wasn't as crisp as I would like so I rendered a piece out seperately and used that. Process Notes: DAZ Studio render, except the backgrounds which were done in Vue7i. Compositing and postwork n Photoshop CS3. This image was rendered in several passes. There are a lot of city blockes and a lot of skytraffic in the background, so I had some trouble getting a 1 pass render with LDP2 at 1600x1200 pixels. I ended up doing it multipassed with a 16 light skydome. I rendered seperate passes for the ambient lighting, the skydome, the sunlight and the area light. I did these with the ambient on all of the surfaces pulled to zero... it's really important to turn off all of the self-lighting on the surfaces when you're multipassing, otherwise they will 'stack' when you compisite, causing nasty glows over which you have no control. Next I rendered a pass with no lights and just the skydome ambient turned on - this gave me the sky in the background and the reflection of the sky on all of the foreground surfaces. I reloaded the scene and rendered again with no lights and all of the glows on the antennas, windows and suit details turned on, but no skydome. This gave me independant control over the glows and the sky. Next came a Mood Master Pass and then I rendered a mask of the sky surface so I could isolate it. This was all composited in photoshop, with the individual lighting layers layered in screen mode, the mood master pass and then the sky and glows. I copied the glow layer and blurred it for a little smear on the glows. Finally I added the replacement sky over the top of everything with the mask of the sky surface ensuring that evreything blended correctly. Whew, that sounds a lot harder than it was. Overall render time was probably about 12 hours for the various passes, much of it due to the blurred reflections on Link. As always, your comments and constructive criticism are much appreciated.

Comments (35)

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ThomasMacCallum

6:56AM | Mon, 02 February 2009

Spot on! Bright crisp render with excellent materials. Great fun great image.

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Timesurfer

6:57AM | Mon, 02 February 2009

oh my! tired already just reading how you put this together. lol fantastic image all around!!!

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Amethst25

6:57AM | Mon, 02 February 2009

WOW this is awesome. It looks like a scene from a movie! I am probably reading more into than there really is but the guy on the left needs to clean off his boots. Looks like there is dirt all over them. I really like this one and I'm not much for sci-fi!

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beatoangelico

7:07AM | Mon, 02 February 2009

Fantastic scene and pose, excellent work...!!!!

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DarkStormCrow

7:10AM | Mon, 02 February 2009

Excellent!

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DAVER2112

7:19AM | Mon, 02 February 2009

Very nice work!! :)

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JCD

7:24AM | Mon, 02 February 2009

Great image - love the lighting here...

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Larion

7:42AM | Mon, 02 February 2009

Nice work!

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sim3344

7:58AM | Mon, 02 February 2009

Beautiful scene,well done!!!

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thecytron

8:14AM | Mon, 02 February 2009

Fantastic scene! Great presentation!

blainenorth

8:47AM | Mon, 02 February 2009

Excellent image!

Lyndseyh

8:49AM | Mon, 02 February 2009

Superb lighting and composition - I love that fact that your images are so varied

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Cimaira

10:15AM | Mon, 02 February 2009

picking jaw up off floor< what a wonderful image, as always the attention to detail pays off big time. I really need to have more patience, anyone know where I can get some...NOW. lol Excellent as always Michael and thanks for always explaining your work process, even if I can't follow it exactly. It points me in the direction I should go.

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