Point and laugh time

[Scarecrow]

There are a number of things you can do in post (either Photoshop or Gimp).

Crop the image in to focus on the ship more.
Use a photo of clouds to replace the existing computery ones.
Use a radial zoom blur seperately on the background and the ship. Make the background effect quite exaggerated. This will give the image motion and hide the computeriness of the terrain. You might want to add some noise to the image before you do this in order to give the zoom more live pixels to work with.
The more subtle effect on the ship will not only avoid over-blurring it and obscuring it but give the impression that we are moving with it.
Desaturate overall to make the colours more realistic.
Darken the starboard upper surface to enhance the shape of the ship.
Paint over some more detail and markings on the back of the ship to add interest.
Overlay some noise/dirt aswell if only to make the surface more credible to the eye
Finally, maybe a screen pass to boost the lit surfaces and maybe a colour pass to give the image a more uniform pallette.

The ship is too high for a reflection but if you do put it in, it should be subtle, blurred and little more than a shadow. Have a look at footage or images of helicopters flying low over the sea.

you'll find this whole process much cleaner if you render the ship and the background seperately too.

I actually did all this last night as a test - and then realised that I'd gotten the vanishing point for the radial zoom in the wrong place!!! I'm an idiot.

Crow

 

[Shonner]

Crop the image in to focus on the ship more.
Use a photo of clouds to replace the existing computery ones.
Use a radial zoom blur seperately on the background and the ship. Make the background effect quite exaggerated. This will give the image motion and hide the computeriness of the terrain. You might want to add some noise to the image before you do this in order to give the zoom more live pixels to work with.
The more subtle effect on the ship will not only avoid over-blurring it and obscuring it but give the impression that we are moving with it.
Desaturate overall to make the colours more realistic.
Darken the starboard upper surface to enhance the shape of the ship.
Paint over some more detail and markings on the back of the ship to add interest.
Overlay some noise/dirt aswell if only to make the surface more credible to the eye
Finally, maybe a screen pass to boost the lit surfaces and maybe a colour pass to give the image a more uniform pallette.

The ship is too high for a reflection but if you do put it in, it should be subtle, blurred and little more than a shadow. Have a look at footage or images of helicopters flying low over the sea.

you'll find this whole process much cleaner if you render the ship and the background seperately too.

In other words, make it look real.

 

[Scarecrow]

In other words, make it look real.

Well, if that's the objective....

 

[Andrew Boulton]

I'd work in the reflection on the water and some type of "exhaust" to the rear, of just some motion blur along the direction of flght.

I just threw it together as a bit of fun. I may do it properly later.

BTW, how'd you get the light effect around the engines? Post production or rendered?

Lens flare, added by the renderer.

 

[navanod]

Haha...I was doing some digging through old stuff looking for something else, and stumbled across my old copy of Truespace 3...AND all of the project files for the Fer-de-lance above, as well as some others. About 90% of it was pretty much pure crap, but I did discover one gem in the bunch.

If it looks a little familiar to you, it was inspired by the ship on Page 76 of the "Ships of the French Arm" book for 2300, a Thorez-class Courier. Just for fun, I decided to see if I could port it out of TS and into something a little more modern, and viola', another project for down the road. Just thought I'd share; I was kind of tickled to find all of that old stuff.

 

[Gojifam58]

Yeah, I wish I had some of my first efforts to share (a colony ship and a martian airship) they were no better

[EDIT] Actually, I tell a lie. One of the very first things I did using Ray Dream Studio! :

Spider Dalek

Crow

Very clever! What a great way to introduce the Traveller universe to Gay Daleks.:rofl:

To see what I mean, click the link then look for the next things to see on the right. These are gut-bustinly funny.