Landing back on Earth for now. Exploring some renders unrelated to space for a bit, related to Operation: Deli Platter, while I do some more space RnD in the back.

Had fun making this one though! Last week I made a space shuttle render in which it was big in frame. I learned the lesson the hard way to not use wonky 3D scans as hero assets. It does work pretty well in an atmospheric backlit render.

That’s a filmmaking lesson going back the dawn of cinema. If your production value isn’t the best: hide it! The scene was built really quickly with a few landscape geometries + grass and tree scatter. The water is a cube with a water shader + a scaled up normal map.

The atmospherics are a combination of Chaos Corona Global Volume and some Embergen VDB files.

The main thing that sells the shot in my opinion is the motion-blur. I animated the scene with the Space Shuttle landing. Then animated the camera and hit render. It’s important to have a slow shutter speed to get the right amount of motion-blur. But not too slow until it becomes just blur.