Bytescapes

a gallery of computer-generated images

Sunset Starship

Comments

While looking for inspiration, I came across the Deviant Art portfolio of GrahamTG, whose stock in trade seems to be rendering spaceship models against vividly-colored backgrounds (and doing it very well). “I could do that,” I thought. I remembered that I'd recently taken a picture of a particularly vivid sunset, and decided to use that as my backdrop.

Rather than make my own starship, I lazily used Kibarreto's Shuttlestar model, giving it pride of place in the front and center of my scene. I loaded my sunset picture as a backdrop, then added some volumetric clouds below the starship.

The exhaust from the ship's engines is a product of four primitives -- a Fire object, tinted blue-white and made slightly transparent, a pair of stretched spheres textured with a partly-transparent glowing texture, and a point light with the Glow effect applied. The result isn't perfect, but it was good enough for my purposes.

I added Michael 4 as a pilot. He doesn't get out much these days, so it's nice for him to have a chance to fly around in his spaceship.

The object in the upper right is added there to balance the image a bit. It's based on the Rotor Drone model from Valandar's Tech Drones set, retextured and with the missile pods hidden, then extended by adding pieces from DZFire's ever-useful Nurnies Greebles Parts and Pieces sets.

Applications

Carrara 8.5 Pro
DAZ 3D

Models