Topic: Texturing Article-ish thing (Socratic Seminar): "Forcing a sense of scale"

[FoaS_XC]

Alright people, this seminar is hereby declared open.

The question placed in front of you is, "what makes these ships look so huge?" Try and be in depth, other than (duh, the windows - tell me why the windows force that kind of scale, tell me what can be done in order for another person to replicate that effect, tell me what can be done to improve that sense of scale.)

These are the images put before you for this discussion. Other images are welcome, so long as you illustrate a point along with it.




(Many thanks to well-of-souls homeworld shipyard for the images.)

[stewiedude]

I personally think the big one looks huge because of the camera angle it is shot at.... the second one looks big because of the fighters, but without them it wouldnt look big to someone who hasnt played the game

[FoaS_XC]

alright, so obviously camera angles and other ships have some to do with it, but what about from a texturing point of view. Homeworld actually doesnt do anything differently from SFC, except the capacity for color pallettes, and i doubt highly that THAT contributes to scale.

Let me steer this a little differently...How would any of you go about creating windows on a model, and how would you create that window effect in the first images...or like the surface of Coruscant.

[wulf111]

there are many aspects to fool the mind into thinking something it big or small. shading, lighting, detail, shadowing, and comparison, use of all of these can help determine the over all size of a ship but when you dont have a engine that can handel it it would never look right

[Darth Chandley]

Firstly, this reply isn't really going to advance this debate much but I feel compelled to dip my oar in. 

The subject of scale is an odd one, especially in science fiction where objects are frequently bigger than anything any of us has seen and vessel designs are generally "enormous".  I think the answer really lies with common human sized reference points and familiar objects, signage and hull details etc etc...

Take Star Wars for example.  ILM has done a great job of keeping things in scale and retaining that sense of scale in it's effect shots.  We all KNEW that as a result of the very first shot in Star Wars, the Star Destroyer was a pretty big if not huge, vessel.  The miniature was nicely detailed, and the light points heightened that sense of scale to the point where we could believe it was a mile long.  This was reinforce by the way both the SD miniature and the Blockade Runner miniature moved on screen.  This is something that they carried over to each movie in turn so we have an overall sense of scale that fits.  As a side note, when West End games said the SSD was 5 miles long I knew that was wrong. Why? Well because it doesn't look five miles long. Nearer ten, I thought... Which in turn was not perfect but much closer... Anyway I digress.... Back on point... When we see Han tinkering with the Falcon we get an idea of how big it is due to the human sized element and subsequently during the Battle of Endor we totally "get" the fact that Home One is probably two miles long and that rebel cruisers are about the same size(ish) as Star Destroyers... Fighters are smaller because the zip around a lot, capital ships aren't because they don't.....

Now, to Star Trek..... And this is where it gets a bit murky.... I personally think that all sense of scale regarding vessel size has been completely lost now due to FX guys insisting on having 500+ metre starships zip around the screen like X-wings.... In TMP we get a wonderful sense of just how big the "Big E" is and in turn how small it is in relation to V'ger because it behaves like we would expect a 300m starship to behave.... It's fair to say that since mid-TNG NONE of the vessels move around in a "realistic" manner, and since the FX guys often mess up the size of stuff it's little surprise..... I mean, do they protray a big BIG ship moving around gracefully... NO, they have to have ships wizzing around the screen because it "looks cool" and it's quicker to let a computer do it than set up a motion control FX shot... I think that this is the main reason for my dislike of late era ship designs... they just don't look convincingly big,  instead they look like Transformers and move like around like starfighters...

Anyway, as I said earlier this reply hasn't really contributed much but thank you for letting me rant.... 

DC

[Captain Pierce]

Stewie, the second ship is bigger than you think--those aren't fighters, they're corvettes...    But you're on the right track, I think--the Homeworld Motherships look big because most of the other ships are small in comparison.  Honestly, looking at that ship, and having no knowledge whatsoever of the HW universe, there's really nothing in that first pic (other than window size, assuming those ever ARE windows, and I honestly have no idea even after all my time in the HW community :/ ) to give you the idea that it's seven kilometers tall...

And I have to say, Darth, that a mile isn't NEARLY long enough for a standard Star Destroyer, IMO.  That's the same length as the Omega-class destroyer from B5, and that's just strange...  I still can't imagine where the 25,000 crew and 10,000 stormtroopers (or is that the other way around, I can never remember :p ); the squadrons of TIE Fighters, Bombers, Interceptors, and Station Wagons; and the dozens of AT-AT's go...

[FoaS_XC]

lol, darth, thats what a socratic seminar is designed to do, it lets you veer off in such directions as to allow for the exploration of the topic.

I know when i was designing the Choir ships, i quickly decided "okay, most textures are going to be 1024x1024, so that means that say 16 pixels are equal to 20m." and sections that are smaller, i will use 512x512 textures with the same scale, just for that consistancy.

[Dawntreader]

One other thing that makes Star Wars ships look big are the "greebles".  The more the bigger.
One problem with Star Trek ships is the believability of the size of some of the ships.  Until the end of ST: TNG, the ships were reasonable as far as scale was concerned.  There were a few problems, such as the Tamarian Ship and Oberth class.  Beginning with DS9, ship sizes became hard to figure out.  My biggest problem, how can Voyager be OVER 1,000 feet long.  It doesn't look that big.  It looks like it is only 600 feet.

[Captain Pierce]

Actually, Dawn, I have to say, Voyager's design is fairly consistent.    (It is referred to by some as "Sternbach's Pride."  )  At least until the writers got ahold of it, and called the only shuttlebay on the ship "Shuttlebay Two."  Oh, and also until Berman & Braga decided that even the Type-9 shuttle invented just for Voyager wasn't cool enough, and made people design a new shuttle (the Delta Flyer) that wouldn't even fit into "Shuttlebay Two," or indeed any other alleged shuttlebay on the ship. 

The thing is, in this sort of discussion, "Star Trek" and "sense of scale" are pretty much an oxymoron the size of "jumbo shrimp" or "military intelligence."  Any show where the same exact physical model of a starship can be seen at at least three distinct scales just has no leg to stand on, so to speak.  (The model in question would be the Klingon Bird of Prey, where the ship model was used for the 109-meter "B'Rel," the 327-meter "K'vort," and the 654-meter "God Knows What" (in one TNG episode).  (Yes, I know there are even more BoP sizes than that, for example the 35-meter version from "Way of the Warrior," but those were Hallmark Christmas ornaments or MicroMachines, I forget which...  )  We can only be glad that the Enterprise model from the movies was too big even for the loose standards of TNG, or we might have had an Enterprise-D that was smaller than the Enterprise-A...  ::0

[Lord Schtupp]

..... how would you create that window effect in the first images...or like the surface of Coruscant.

Sorry I have not replyd in so long FS. Starting with a seperate layer, I would paint the windows in the pattern desired using a very small or 1 pixel hard edged, non-aliasing brush, then duplicate the window layer, apply a moderate guassian blur to the duplicate in order to get the glow effect. Then I would combine the two, place on top of a black layer, and adjust the luminosity/brightness to get the illumination map.

I use Illustrator to do all my windows, markings, greeb etc. then copy-paste into photoshop, but thats how i would do it with just photoshop.

[Sandman3D]

1st off, great topic FoaS!!

2nd, scaling is difficult, especially with the limitations we have regarding Trek designs and the game engine we build for. With the ship I designed yesterday, after I finished drawing out the major details, I had to try and figure out how big I wanted it to be, and how many crew it would be capable of handling. As I'm not too good with things like that, I just guess-timated...probably way off too. One thing that I try for is to look at current submarine sizes and crew sizes...I figure the same kind of scale could work, especially as my design is non-Trek and set in the near future.

3rd, thanx LS for that on how you make your windows...gonna try that on the X-303.

[Anthony Scott]

This is outstanding! I have been looking for something like this to help me understand this modeling stuff.

Semper, Carry ON

[Red_Green]

I personally think the big one looks huge because of the camera angle it is shot at.... the second one looks big because of the fighters, but without them it wouldnt look big to someone who hasnt played the game

I totally agree about the cam angle and fighters. Plus a closeup where the entire ship doesn't appear in the the pic lends itself to trick the mind into believeing its huge. I think you could make the U.S.S. Raven look like a giant freighter with camera angle and close up. Scaling sown shuttles to appear miniscule compared to the Raven would help. Plus adding more greebles as someone else mentioned. More windows as well. I mean put 200 windows on it instead of 8 and you can't help bet think of it as having a crew of at least 200 instead of 20.