Reply To: Space Station Challenge 2021 WIP – Starlab P

[nick-van-den-broeck]

I published the final result to the gallery. You can find it here: https://cgcookie.com/u/nick-van-den-broeck/projects/space-station-challenge-2021-starlab-p

So after last time, I added animations and even had time to add in some audio (which is a first for me).

I changed my station building blocks, I added a ring of light around it. In the compositor I gave it some glow. Then I got the idea to do the same thing to the pulsar itself which gave it a lot more wow factor:

For those of you interested, here is a screenshot of the compositor:

Let me break it down a bit: the top path is for the pulsar itself. The blue nodes are Object ID masks and a depth mask. Using and object ID mask, I get the pulsar separated. Then I give it a blue collor and apply a double blur to it (I always do a double blur, one harder one with a small radius and then a larger one but less strong). From this blured image, I again subtract all the objects in front of the sphere. If you don’t do that, then the glow will come over objects in front. That is not completely unrealistic (I think it is called bleeding), but not what I was going for here.

On the bottom, you can also see two blur nodes being applied, these work on the emission layer and will thus single out the orange rings of the station and the fiery glow of the rocket’s exhausts.

Here is the sequencer

you can se the 3 scenes which I use in the animation. On the right hand side, in green, there is a time node because I was not pleased with the speed of that third scene. There is only so much you can do, but with limited time, I could not rerender.. I got all the sounds from freesound.org

An now, let me finish by sharing the link to the final animation (remember, play with sound):

Personally I really like what I got. This is for me the first multi-scene animation that I have created as far as i can remember. I like the fact that the low poly facet allows you to not stay in the modelling phase to long, which is something that always hindered me in the past.