Test animation following AlaskanFX 's very excellent tutorial (even if I went insane because I couldn't get it to behave like theirs!) along with my first attempt at poking Davinci Resolve
Right here we go, a full animation worthy enough to not be called a test: Still a little janky in places, especially as what seemed a nice smooth pace in the previews in blender turned out to be waaaay too fast, so I had to selectively slow bits, messing with the frame rate, but I've started messing with davinci resolve for some basic editing and it seems to have worked out acceptably. There's a couple of small changes to the ships actually, I ever so slightly tweaked the depth on the hull texture and added a rough clearcoat so it catches the light better, I slightly darkened the red of the bussards, and I fixed the vane rotation glitch (although with the frame rates slowed you can't actually see it in the flyby scene - next time!).
The frame rate alterations really hurt what is otherwise a very cool shot. How are you rendering your previews? In 3DSMax, I can record the viewport frame by frame to get a very quickly produced preview animation. The resulting preview looks terrible, obviously, but is a good way of quickly creating a video file that accurately shows my animation timings. Can Blender do something similar? The other useful thing I can suggest is to create a very low resolution proxy-mesh of your ship that is linked to your high-res ship. When animating, only have the low-res proxy visible in your workspace/viewport. This will help Blender/Max/etc to minimize having to drop frames or slowing down the animation during playback within the app.
Oh I just set the viewport shading mode to solid and hit play on the slider. Its defintiely a thing I intend on taking more care with next time, especially if I want to render that high resolution again - the frame rate futzing was very much salvaging the render imo to somehting that was pleasing even if still a little janky.
In your Playback settings do you have Sync set at "Play Every Frame" or "Frame Dropping"? If you are using "Play Every Frame" your timing will be off as it won't keep a consistent frame rate for previewing.
Ah yeah that looks to be it. IT still seems slower and smoother in the playback than in the raw rendered footage but definitely faster than when it was playing every frame Ah well live and learn, I am still happy with the end result overall
Also in an oddly specific and amusing though, I am very happy that in this shot the balls are silver! .... Wait I need to clarify that. The spherical caps on the end of the nacelles are supposed to be silver but in all the previous ones they've come out oddly dark, I think a combination of the specific shader I used and the cowling often shadowing them. Here they're exactly as wanted!
Right that's better, none of that frame rate fuckery And by setting it to simplify and completely cutting out any post processing in blender I got the whole thing down to a few hours before porting over to davinci resolve*. Camera motions could be smoothed out at the start but I didn't want to make it any longer until I knew how it will turn out. *In theory it was rendered at 4K and I'm not sure if Davinci would only do HD because I hit simplify, or because the lens flare image I used was distinctly less than HD, but annoyingly setting to upscale on the export was saying it would take an entire day, so 1440p it is Wasn't quite able to mimic the glare effect I liked in the last render, but the more subtle approach here I think worked well for it, and I'm impressed with how the engine flare turned out for a simple, non animated image thats just tracked and scaled.
Much better camera work on this one. I love the lighting as well. The bit at the end with the impulse engines firing up is my favorite. Once you get the camera animation smoothed out, these ship sequences are going to be outstanding.
I really like the results of playing around with warm toned lighting and a soft cool toned glow - not sure it's especially realistic but it *feels* realistic. The engine flare I'm really happy with, it's literally a stock glow placed over the image and moved/scaled with the engines by hand - davinci's keyframing is very nice and simple from the looks of it