Colliding Planets

Most Recent Update below



Original Post
This thread will be dedicated to honest critiques of this project for the BlenderGuru “Another Planet” Competition.
My first attempt is here:

Soon I will add a more foggy and starry background and some ships flying away from the colliding planets.

Thanks!

Attachments


I added the stars and fixed some lighting issues. I worked on the collision by putting the planets closer together, improving the impact light, and adding displacement maps for cracks. I Worked on the spaceship by lessoning the blur, tweaking the material, and adding more detail (using the Greebling tactic).
I still need to: make the spaceship material more realistic, add more of the background stars, and add more of the greeble thingies.


Just one thing to think about. The Earth has a very thin crust so underneath you have the hot magma. Therefore the cracks would be bright, really emphasising the cracks and the breakup. Obviously not all planets are like this, but it could be a cool effect.
A second thing is that the bump maps look too high. The objects look like asteroids not planets. Usually from far away, a planet looks smooth. Maybe add some atmospheric effects to emphasise the size.

Thanks for the advice! Here is my update for today:
Ship: Added more “Greebles” and made material more realistic
Planets: Made texturing more detailed to add greater sense of scale, sculpted craters, added bright material in the cracks, and fixed the outer atmosphere.
Collision: Improved color of the center of impact, added more shards, and added dust
Background: Added more stars with more randomization, and added more fogginess.
Whats next:
Ship: EVEN MORE GREEBLES!
Planets: More distinct features for scale.
Collision: Improve glow, make dust more visible.
Background: Not sure
Any suggestions? Thanks!


Perhaps there is too much stuff, rocks in the air at this point?

Thank you for the advice!
Today’s update:
Ship: adjusted glow to ship lights, improved material for thrusters,
Planets: Made texturing more detailed to add greater sense of scale, sculpted craters, added bright material in the cracks, and fixed the outer atmosphere.
Closer rock: Modeled/added material, put flag on it for perspective and sense of scale, blurred for movement,
Collision: made heat distortion and increased glow, made material have much more detail, added cloud layer, and got rid of the craters.
Background: Replaced it with real image
Whats next:
Ship: Thrusters NEED fixing
Any suggestions? Thanks again!


The coliding planets have greatly improved since the first render.

The ship has one thing that bother me. I can’t decide in wich direction it is going. It’s hard for me to say if the green things are weapons or propulsion devices.

maybe have each planet look different, like a red and a green planet, or bleu, well not too extreme, but some difefrence as based upon diffrent chemical makeup.

Reminds me of old elite game…

I think you need to step back for a second and think about your colors.

Here are the color that will attract the most attention. The orangeish yellow color from the cracks, and the green color from your engine thruster things.

These colors don’t really play nicely together. It kind of makes me feel uneasy looking at them.

From the two colors, the orange is the most important (and I like it the most). I took the liberty to take it and run it through a piece of color picking software called agave (I’m fairly sure it’s linux only but if anyone wants something similar, there should be something available for windows). It can automatically output different color schemes based off of a single color (watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj1FK8n7WgY), one of these is complements, here is the result:


As you can see, the colors go together much more nicely. My recommendation is that you make the thrusters a bluish color and really blow out the planet, here’s an example (I hope you don’t mind that I drew over your image)


Sorry about how rough it is, this is just an example of the kind of feel I would go for.

In adition to this, your going to want to add motion blur to help add a more dynamic feel. The stars especially need blur. You should probably also have some debris coming towards the camera. It’s another thing that would help bring a more dynamic feel.

I hope this is helpful.

WOW! Out of all the wonderful advice from various cg forums your advice of this image is by far the most thought out and worked on. Your advise is GREAT! Even your rough over sketch makes the image more colorfully harmonious.
Definetily very helpful, I will take this advice and use it to improve this image.
APPRECIATED!