Indeed, there are several differences between the photo and your renderings.
As you guessed, photos taken inside a room cannot be compared to the
darkness of open space. The most "realistic" look is usually achieved when
we see something we're familiar with, and that is (for most of us anyway)
being inside rooms, or outside where light bounces off many surrounding
objects. My own obervation is that even photos from space aren't completely
"realistic" looking.

However, photos are still a tad better than your rendering. There are a few
things you could do:

1)  Your rendering is hardly realistic because everything is "perfect". By
this, I'm NOT referring to dirt (though I see some dirt on the photo). Dirt
is not a top priority here. But the reflections are too perfect, and the
shadows have too sharp edges. By blurring those 2 aspects of your rendering,
the photographic quality will improve.

2)  The light-intensity seems off, even for a space rendering. I see at
least 2 lightsources: Above and below the craft. Both have almost the same
intensity. Both seems to cause highlights that are too dim, and diffuse that
is too bright. As you know, sunlight is much stronger than anything your
computer screen can produce. It's also much stronger than any photo can
hold. A camera that takes a photo of a landscape, for example, and faces the
sun, will either produce a completely white sky with the ground "intact", or
a completely black ground, with the blue sky "intact"... When some cameras
manages to do both things, it's because they have a very efficient light
responce curve... Now, this is what you need to 'copy' in order to get a
photo-realisitc rendering.

Talking about these things, and doing them, are 2 different things of
course. I haven't yet tried a project like yours (metal in space) so I don't
know how easy the solution will be. But a good 'start' that will get rid of
these very artificial materials, are to use only 1 light source for the sun,
and have this illuminate the entire craft. First of all: Directly where the
craft faces the sun. Secondly, where the craft reflects light upon itself
(indirect illumination) and third: A planet nearby - if that's your plan
anyway.. Adding another lightsource to fake the presense of planet, is not a
good idea. Using a big blue sphere is a good idea. Just be sure to use
radiosity for all this to work.

When you've done this (look at "rad_def.inc" for using radiosity) it's time
to blur the reflections, which is also very easy. Just add a normal modifier
to the surfaces that say:  normal { bumps .2 scale .0000001 }  and then
render the scene with this anti-alias:  +AM2 +A0.0 +R2 -J

I would be very interested in seeing the result after this. Then you can do
2 more things, actually: Add some blur caused by the lens of the virtual
camera - this will cause the areas that are very bright to "glow" which is
very realistic since the human eye does the same thing (an example of this
can be seen if you look at the ocean during a sunny day .. note the
beautiful flares)... Last - but this is a cheap trick - you could add a tad
of noise over the entire image.... or some dirty materials as they can be
seen on the Cassini photo.

Good luck! And thanks for reading this very long post...!!  ;o)  Hope it
wasn't too long.

Regards,
Hugo

Post a reply to this message