Animation - Part 1 (Props / Extras)

In order for my scene to look more lively, I have added different bits and bobs to make things stand out more. The first of which are the thrusters lighting on the back of the Star Destroyer.

These thrusters are made of polygon cones. Each thruster has two cones coming out. One is the outer light and the other is the inner light. The outer light is a basic blue lambert with a slight transparency. The inner light is a lighter shade of blue, however its ambient colour is pushed to max which gives it that vibrant and rich glow. It is easy to add a normal glow affect, however this disorientates the visuals of the star destroyer so I chose to not use that.
At the moment the full affect of the light is not shown as the image is not a render, it is a print screen from my viewport.


I've also created a couple of planets, as well as a sun to fill out the background space. This is to show the environment around the star destroyers, as realistically they wouldn't be in pure blank space with no surroundings.

You can instantly see compared to previous posts that the scene already has more life to it than before. These planets not only fills up the space, but it demonstrates the sense of location. Having these planets can justify that battles are taking place, however, if it was blank space, why would ships be battling?

Here we also have the sun, which again does a fine job of filling the scene out. If you look carefully you may notice that the sun is slightly lumpy. This is because I didn't boost up the divisions like I did with the planets. I chose to have it like this because the sun usually has lumps of flame which burst out. In this shot you aren't close enough to see the burst, but you have the illusion of what its doing from far away.




Finally, the first render of my animation. This shot is a short establishing shot with the sun in the shot. You will notice that there is also a lens flare that I implemented to give the shot some life. This clip is just before the star destroyers enter the scene.

The last thing I was originally going to add was an asteroid belt, however I feel that it could be used more affectively later in my animation.