Scene Mockup

Gas week is over.  It came and went with much frustration and little satisfaction.  The fact is, volume rendering is hard.  Especially when you're path tracing it and trying to account for every subtle detail, including wavelength-dependent multiple scattering (which you've really got to do to get nebulae right).

I didn't get everything accomplished that I wanted to during gas week, but that's ok, because I failed softly.  This entire project was designed to be soft-failable, meaning that every component should look good enough by itself to be an entire project, just in case the whole composition doesn't come together.

Surprisingly, though, the composition is starting to come together, even if the gas isn't everything that I wanted it to be.  Here's my first mockup of all of the elements pulled together:

It's obviously very rough.  The cool parts of the ship are occluded (while the lame part is naked and visible).  The asteroid texture is too fake.  The sun isn't positioned correctly, so the color composition doesn't work very well.  The beam is too fake and doesn't scatter enough.  The debris is unconvincing.  There's only one asteroid (thankfully, that one's easily fixed).

But for everything that this image does incorrectly, I think there's at least one thing that it does correctly.  The wavelength-dependent scattering looks good, and you can see the subtle color gradient caused by red scattering with a lower probability than green.  The gas looks surprisingly nice in the background, with nebulous puffs and dark patches clearly visible.  The asteroid geometry is high-quality and detailed (even though I left out craters).  The metal on the ship looks metal-ish, so that metallic Fresnel approximation is working.

I've got a long way to go, and I will probably never be satisfied.  But that's good.  The point was to push myself, and I've done that - to the extreme.  The next two weeks will be even more extreme, but I'm hopeful.