These are two 10-second shots made using the materials, textures, compositing, and rendering techniques we propose to use for "Lunatics!" shots (or very nearly).

Project: http://lunatics.tv

Some details about the shots:

Both were created in Blender, with Freestyle edge-rendering in the foreground and a softer background based on painted textures. These were originally created at 1920x1080, reduced to 1280x720 for upload.

Soyuz Podstaging:

This shows Soyuz pod separation, which occurs at about 50 km altitude.

Spacecraft model created by Chris Kuhn.

Toon-shading materials and textures by Terry Hancock.

Earth-surface, cloud-deck, and horizon backdrops created by Terry Hancock in Gimp.

The flame effect is created using animated meshes with animated textures, enhanced by post-processing with the "glare" filter in the compositor. This also gives some atmospheric lighting to the highlights on the spacecraft, enhancing the effect of harsh sunlight in near-vacuum.

There is also a 3-frame motion-blur applied to this one, which smooths out any aliasing in the animation.

This is NOT the final animation shot -- the camera tracking curve is definitely not final. There is also going to need to be a little sleight-of-hand to separate the pods from the rocket in the tail end of the shot (at the tail end of this shot, they've reached the end of their "rope" so to speak in their Blender rig -- we'll probably cut slightly earlier to a different angle with the pods separately animated).

You might want to compare with the pre-viz version of this shot (the camera track and animation is identical): (VIMEO) (PEERTUBE)

The (Present-Day) ISS:

The space station model in the actual show will be a science-fictional update to the ISS, representing another 30 years of development. But Chris Kuhn has completed this present-day version as an intermediate step, so we're using it for testing. This presented some serious challenges because of the size of the model and the number of Freestyle edges that are drawn. Optimizing the model to make it possible to render with Freestyle was a useful learning experience.

The Earth backdrop here was painted by Timothee Giet's using Krita.

This shot still has some temporal aliasing, because motion blurring was turned off to save on rendering time (since I'm rendering on my present desktop system, these shots can take days to render -- we want to build an inexpensive cluster for production animation).

I hope these will give a much better idea of how we want "Lunatics!" to look when animated on screen. We will be doing some additional tests on interior and character shots, although these require more work (we don't have final rigs for any of the characters yet).

Lunatics Project | lunatics.tv CC By-SA 3.0