Real Worlds: Developing the Final Piece

Developing the Final Piece

When receiving feedback on my final piece, several areas of improvement were located. These included the rendering of the metal, the values on the ship, and the contrast between the ship and the rest of the scene. This encompasses an area of art that I wish to further develop in future projects: values. I often find that when developing pieces I keep the values very constrained together, and that this dampens the depth and contrast in the piece as a whole, making it less visually distinct and sometimes making the colours seem muddy. I identified this in my previous character design paintovers, and tried to rectify it when initially developing the scene. Ultimately, I found that I had to push these values further.

To assist in the development of the piece, I looked back to my benchmark references and analysed what they did successfully that I could implement into the piece. Looking at the Megaship illustrations again, areas of sharp and almost glowing highlight contrast against stark black shadows: this helps to build up the forms of the structures and make them seem more atmospheric in the setting, aligning with the darkness of space.

When continuing development I began with adding colour to the planet. Though I initially intended to keep it greyscale, feedback indicated that colour could increase the contrast between the planet and the ship. I was also told that attempting to paint the ship in a looser manner could help in analysing where areas of light and dark would sit. This would help me define forms and add contrast.

To add colour to the planet I used a gradient map, keying it with dark red and bright gold. I wanted to keep the sharp dropoff between the light and dark, as I felt this helped increase the spherical form of the planet. In future developments I intended to create a sharp and glowing highlight over the outer rim of the planet, which would further increase contrast.

    

I also added an atmosphere to the planet, which I did through creating a red circle with the shape of the planet that was gaussian blurred away from the planet's edge. Red, this emulated how light reflects off the planet's surface and bounces across the atmosphere, additionally defining the edge of the planet slightly. I would go on to dull the colour of the dark side of the planet, as the reflected light would not be uniform across the planet's surface.

Other benchmark references I looked at in the development of my piece were those of the ships from Star Wars, particularly the Star Destroyer. These ships contain a lot of intricate details known as "greebles", small protrusions and panels that, whilst adding to the visual noise and detail of the ship, do not necessarily have any function or contribute to the mechanical design of the ship itself. In this, I tried to work in a heirarchy of shapes: every large panel in the ship could have several medium-sized panels within it, that would then have smaller panels adjoining them. As such, I began with adding basic values and then added square panel shapes atop it.

From here I went back to add metal texture to the ship itself. I added line art to better define the shapes of the ship, and then used a painterly approach to blend and sharpen the areas of light and dark values. I then added shadows and sharp, glowing highlights: I am immensely happy with how this turned out, and feel that the highlights add tremendously to the metallic texture of the ship.

I then repeated this process for the smaller frigates in the background of the scene. As these are further away, they are much less detailed than the ship. Nevertheless, I feel the details I added contribute to the texture of the ship, and feel that the ships on the whole add to the contrast of the scene.



When creating the background, I used white dots with a slight blur to create the impression of stars. I then used photobashing to layer several hubble telescope images over one another, blurring, erasing and using layer effects to make them sit atop one another and influence the overall colour of the background. 

As well as using these images to form the background, I also added paint to some to blend and extend their forms and colours. 



I then added final atmospheric colours and mild shading against the background asteroids, pushing them further back in the scene. 

On the whole, I am immensely happy with how the piece has developed and feel that the additions of sharpened contrast and values have greatly impacted the texture and visual interest in the scene.