WC Saga Hellcat Combat Picture

echelon_four

Spaceman
I was messing around with trying to achieve a cinematic look and colour scape of modern film. Please let me know what you think guys. The author of the original image and contributions were already included in the image. What a fantastic picture you guys; probably my favourite of a space battle ever. And there was some work put into the cinema image, so please critique but don't bash saying one filter or layer was applied...it was more complex than that.

Original:
wingcommanderoriginal.jpg


Fun Test with cinema style
wingcommandercinematicfilm.jpg
 
Thanks.
I doubt that I will ever have the time to get a movie done. Maybe some smaller clips but thats most likely it.
But even if I had to time to do the space scenes I can't model characters and I would need a nice story. Well one can still learn and dream about it ^_^
 
I am using Max as 3D software and depending on the scene I use Photoshop for stills like the one above or Combustion for animations.

As for beeing a bit dark and blury...well when it would be more lightend you would see how cheap the cockpit is modeled ^_^
( I don't like the second shot anymore...its even to dark for me )

Speaking of the lightning...well never learned in a special way. I had a crashcurse about it and got the rest by try and error....and some tuts that I found on the web.
In general I must say that the best way is to look at some other art and then try to recreate what you see. It also help to just get out of the house and look at things on you way to school, the supermarket or just randomly walk somewhere. Look how things are looking at different daytimes.
I remeber myself looking at a railling made out of metal for quite some time just to see how it reflects light. People where allready staring at me ^_^

Well if you want some ideas on how to do lightning search the web...google is your friend...or look around at forums that are about modeling. I like to visit scifi-meshes.com for inspiration.
 
That looks great! Its a bit dark, but I'd love to see that quality in the cutscenes if that were possible. Hmmmm :) Lars? Is making the videos look kinda grainy like this possible in MAX? Do you know how to do something like it? Maybe Adobe After effects can do something similar?
 
You can definitely do it with After Effects. If not with the standard tools like I did with PhotoShop, you can use a suite like MagicBullet to achieve similar results.

The reason it's so dark and grainy actually has to do with how cinema film captures and displays colour...it's more wistful looking. That's why home video cameras look very similar to our natural eyes, and movies seem so theatrical. If you saw it in action in a video clip you would see the overall darkness of the picture isn't that bad, because there would be other lightsources impacting the image at any given instance of the firefight. Also, the focus is a huge issue as well in terms of presenting a sense of film. I haven't used Max in a long time, but I'm certain you can do that naturally...though post effects work magic often.
 
Adding grain and other stuff like I did should also be possible in AFX as mentioned. I haven't worked with it for a very long time but it should be.
Else its also possible in Max but dosn't provide that much options for finetuning as other software IMO.
The thing is some effects are better applied in a compositing software...others like motion blur are better be done in the 3d software. At least that is my experiance.

As for doing this for cutscenes...well it would be a lot of work. Making a still us much easier then doing a complete animation. Not to mention the time it would consume.

If you want to see a image that I have rendered and postproed nearly completly in MAX look at my "Lone Carrier" image. Exept that I finetunes the saturation later it was done completly in max.
 
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