Advice wanted for composition, angle, and lighting of a render for going on a Tshirt

OK, i am planning to get some cgi work of mine(the hellhound fighter, now finished) printed on a t-shirt. I wanted some advice on the composition of the image and what sort of layout would be good. The printing method will be “that plastic like stuff which gets “ironed” on”. Can you advise on what colours are a good choice, the printing equipment can deal with grey colours that are close together but my image is very grey. Look at the colours on my (earlier)renders of the hellhound fighter to get an idea of the colours. I can do background alpha channels and am not forced to do square images where everything within the square is printed and everything outside is shirt material, but the shapes of the alpha regions can’t be too complex (cutting out the ship is ok, cutting out silicon chip circuit style traces is not).

Please suggest what colour of shirt an image of a ship with that much grey would look good on, and please suggest cool layouts for the image, how to combine multiple views of the model into 1 overall graphic (i mean advice on how to position them for good composition, not advice on how to use photshop/GIMP, i already know the practical methods for the editing i will require), and please suggest what layouts i could use that allow for pleasing looking “inset” images (little detail shots and such) and ideas about general background patterning which is not too demanding from an alpha perspective are also helpful.

I would also like some suggestions as to good angles of the model to show in renders, and where lighting for those renders should be, i have been noticing that to get visible reflection (specular) off the surfaces of my model i need the main light(a sun) and the camera to both be at a similar angle to the surface, (the same sort of geometry as a mirror in optics where angle of incidence equals angle of output) but doing this leaves the model in silhouette. Any tips on what lighting angles might let me have some visible specular effects whilst illuminating the ship from the camera’s side and having visible shadows to give it some depth (rather then everything being universally equally lit and flat looking).

Thanks some pics of the model are now attached

note also my render settings, blender internal, “ray tracing” turned off under “shading”, “sub surface scattering” turned off under shading, “environment lighting” is turned on with a value of 1 in the world settings, gather is set to “raytrace”.

The final shirt won’t have this horrid brown as a background colour, i’ve just put it as the background for these few pics(i would be grateful for advice on what colour it should be replaced with on the final shirt) so that it can clearly be ditinguished from the model and so it does not “outshine” it.

Please note, there are more helpful details and more pictures in my second post(overall the third post) on this thread.






Please note, there are more helpful details in my second post(overall the third post) on this thread.

You need to show some pics here for explanation, as well as maybe break all that text above into small paragraphs on each part you need help on. Iron on style vinyl print for t-shirts can usually look good with any photo as long as you use a good printer and not the typical off the shelf pc printer.

Turn on the composition guides in your camera view under the Properties tab for the camera, and experiment with your camera angle that way.

Sorry about not posting renders earlier, had some formattting rouble and connection problems. Have edited first post a bit, this post contains extra images as this site won’t let me put more than 3 pics per post. The printing is being done with the help of a commercial photogrpahy/printers shop, they have a decent quality printer and often do t-shirt prints for people.





Most of the details about my situation are explained in the first post but there are a few other pieces of info i can provide.

  1. the model has panel lines, the panel line material has been setup so it looks very similar to the main hul except when under intense light, it’s a really cool effect when i get panel lines whihc blend in under normal light but then stand out when a bright “specular” is on a part of the model. that should be visible in my renders.
    2.the main light is the highlighted one in the screenshot but there are 7 other lights, 6 providing very dim illumination from along each axis (+x,-x,+y,-y,+z,-z) and one providing medium illumination in a direction approxmately opposite to the main light.

Both posts have been edited to hopefully make them clearer so you can understand what i am asking about and see my situation.
Thanks

Make sure to look at a 3 point light set up to help get the edges showing, and once you final your pose you should render with the idea of strong contrast. You might think of setting up your specular to have some color in it, as solid white will seem flat and the print will just grade from the white to the color printing.

You also might try incorporating a planet or some other thing in the background like a moon to take up some of the space as a geometric shape - that woudl reduce that amount of alpha area to have to simplify for cutting.

Thanks. I was also wondering about which angles you think the ship looks best from, i tried to show here all the main angles i could so that you would have a clear idea of the overall shape and be able to work out which of these looks best of whether you think there is another angle that could look better. Or perhaps suggestions of how to make a “blueprint” style image, with multiple views and “factsheet” style boxes for inset detail images? and in that case which angles and lightings for the model should be shown? One other thing, what is a 3 point light source, how is it organised, which light types are to be used for which lights?

Toss up between the first two - third is too flat to tell the silhouette, and the bottom view might be good on the back of the shirt :smiley:

Just google “3 point lighting” and blender, and you will see some recent tutorials on it.

Blueprint style can be done with Freestyle edge marks so that the whole thing is rendered as edges.

Can anyone give more tips on this, it’s turning out to be really tricky to find the best angle and get the lighting to work well with it, one of the things i really want is to show off the panel lines, but because of the way i coloured them (deliberately) they are only apparent when there is a glancing light source. This makes them stand out as dark because although their diffuse colour is practically identical to the diffuse of the main hull their specular value is much lower.

I did look up 3 point lighting and it was helpful but it’s still really tough to find the positions of lights that show this off best, though. However I can see it certainly works better than the current “well lit from all angles” lighting arrangement.

Another couple of things to ask:

how should i select a background colour which won’t “outshine” the fighter. The model is mostly grey, what should i do so that this grey object stands out from the background (for now the background is a plain colour in the images, once printed the background will be colour of the shirt, which will be very close to whichever colour works best in the image.). I’ve seen so many awful images where a grey object is placed against a bright blue (or other bright coloured) background and the viewer’s eye just slides off the object onto the bright coloured background.

Also I’m thinking of making a sort of “user’s manual” document for this sci-fi craft , packed full of renders,descriptions and technical details(yes i calculated things like how powerful the engines would have to be and how hot the radiators would need to be to keep this thing at a constant temperature, needless to say it’s power consumption for the engines alone is 83 times that of current human civilisation) of the sci-fi craft. Any thoughts on the kind of images that should go in that? The document would be a kind of cross between a sales brochure and an instructions for use guide. This is not directly related to the image on the t-shirt but as this thread is about finding good lighting and camera angles i thought it was relevant to post this question here.

You are probably going to want use colored lights. Warm tone(s) for your primary light(s) source, cool tones for fill lights. A black ‘spacey’ background would be best.