Stock Ion probe at Duna

[Drew Kerman]

Been spending the past week watching various Blender tutorials - thanks to @esinohio for the links! Decided to put some of what I've learned to use. It was annoying to find that I still only had a general idea of how things worked and I had to go back and reference several videos again to figure out what to do for some things but in the end after about 8 hours of work, including render time, I finally ended up with something that I found satisfying. Scratched that itch for a bit!

The trickiest part was the lighting, since I was adamant about getting the sun in the shot I knew the probe was going to be really hard to see. I made the dish more reflective and found a good angle for the probe to catch sunlight as well as Dunashine after I moved the probe in closer, although I still had to bump up the Gamma a bit in composite and re-render the probe at a much higher sampling so I could brighten it without showing much lighting artifacts. Turning it so the battery was visible let me use its LED as an emissive as well. The Ion stream is created by embedding a torus shape ring into the engine model as an emissive and then having it wrapped by a cone shape set with a volumetric shader. Was originally planning to use a RenderLayer for the probe in composite so I could access the emissive channel but that didn't prove useful so I just rendered everything out as images and composited them for the final result.

Many thanks again to @Starwhip for the planet models and hopefully he continues to work on his Kerbol System modeling project!

If anyone wants to check it out, here's the blend file.

[Starwhip]

Lovely render! I like the ion trail especially.

The sun bugs me a little though. Lens flare in Blender is a tricky beast, which is why I usually do that in another program.

[Drew Kerman]

staying in Blender was a constraint I made for myself. I've seen in done better in the tutorials I've watched but I wasn't willing to go back and review them. For my first attempt, I'm happy with how it turned out. What other program do you use?

Yea I'm extremely happy with how well the ion trail turned out, was way easier than I thought it would be. That was the biggest thing I had to sort of cobble together on my own, although this video helped

Edited April 26, 2016 by Gaiiden