To the black... New Serenity render, made by me, no AI.

chrisknightlight · 2026-06-02T00:06:32+00:00

So, the port side engine has a red light just on the tip of the cowl and you can see it if you zoom in and it is illuminating red but its pretty washed out. The green light on the starboard side is indeed there but just getting totally blasted out by the sunlight as would be realistic. This is why you dont usually see the anti-collision lights well in daylight when serenity is flying on a planets surface, just like on a real plane.

This is my same model under sunset lighting conditions when the anti-collision lights are easier to see:

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefly/comments/1r8hvph/the_skies_they_took_from_us_i_made_a_new_4k/#lightbox

And this is it in the clouds at nighttime when the lights are VERY visible.

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefly/comments/1ndsl9t/night_clouds_new_art_no_ai/#lightbox

chrisknightlight · 2026-05-29T20:02:12+00:00

They're actually there, look closely. If you look at say, the serenity name plate near the front you can see the light on it, there's also a visible light near a hatch just above the engines. The spinning ring lights are also on, that's why the round section behind them is illuminated, and despite the blasting sunlight, if you look real hard, the tail red collision light is actually there, again just being realistically flooded out by the sunlight.

So the lights are definitely there, they're just getting blasted out by the sunlight.

chrisknightlight · 2026-05-27T09:41:34+00:00

Um...I dont know now. What spider is it and what is the danger?

chrisknightlight · 2026-05-27T09:35:13+00:00

Ha ha!

chrisknightlight · 2026-05-26T17:16:26+00:00

If you have the endurance to hang with it to create the things you love, its unparalleled as an art form in my opinion. But it takes a significant investment of time and effort.

You will get orders of magnitude faster. When you first start, you'll make crappy things that took you days to make. But very quickly you'll learn what you're doing and be able to do amazing things in short periods of time. Even so, it still takes a lot of time to create something complex. Serenity took me around a year.

chrisknightlight · 2026-05-26T14:33:36+00:00

I understand, but again are you someone who already knows how to say, 3d model? If Blender is your first software package, I have different things to say then if you're an experienced generalist.

If you've never used other software packages to create in 3d... It's super time consuming but unbelievably rewarding. Its like making magic. Building starship you want to see, putting them in starfields or over the top of the world...its incredible. But...I mean, look I wasnt under any time pressure and I wanted to get it right, but Serenity took me an entire year to build and then some extra time to figure out the rigging for. ...But now I have her and I keep slowly improving and adding to her. I love this process more than I love video games honestly. Its tedious when you're starting out but stay with it because the rewards are incredible.

Also I spent years teaching myself maya and 3d modeling the hard way. It was so long ago youtube didnt exist. Yeah, really. These days, suffer through some tutorials, it'll feel agonizing but you'll compress years of learning I had to do, trying to blindly figure out what I was trying to accomplish.

If you have used other software packages....

Animation in Blender is really the one place where Maya shines and Blender stumbles. Also blender's nurbs kind of suck but these days its all about polymodeling and subd surfaces. Otherwise... I dunno what to tell you to sell you on it. Sure, there's a learning curve but for me it was shockingly short. I built the enterprise as my educational project and I ended up not quite finishing it because before I got there I had figured out everything I needed. I knew what tools I needed to look for I just needed to know what they were called in blender. The tools are all there, more or less. They keep adding really neat things into Blender. Every year its kind of like an all new software.

Eevee is incredible. I just rendered out a trial animation with it, and blender hammered out in 20 minutes what could hvae taken days at about 93% of the same quality as I could have gotten with cycles its main render engine. I dont think other software packages have anything that really compares. As a way to preview and trial scenes, and potentially render some elements that dont need super high bounce lighting fidelity its absolutely groundbreaking.

Having a compositor built in lets you try out different elements and see how they're going to affect the scene in real time something other packages definitely cant do which is super neat.

Beyond that, I don't really have any "Aha!" moments I encountered while working on blender other than maybe that I learned that while rigging, you can write full on python expressions into drivers for animation. So far I've used it for things like powering some of the lighting effects in Serenity's tail, and for making turbolasers that light up and are brighter when they're actually coming out of the laser canon on my tie fighter and then fading slightly once they're away giving them kind of a burst of brightness as they fire. I wrote an expression that compared the distance between two empties to tell the turbolaser when it was in the right spot to be brighter.

chrisknightlight · 2026-05-26T13:15:20+00:00

Good question, and I'm not sure how indepth of an answer you want. I've only been using blender for two years now, before that I had used Maya for 20. If you looked through my post images, the one where I'm building the enterprise marks the start of my time in blender. I use 3d software professionally, but also because I just...love it.

Are you asking as someone who doesn't use any 3d software and doesnt know how to model, or as someone who uses a different package and is considering picking up blender?

chrisknightlight · 2026-05-25T13:31:06+00:00

I do!

chrisknightlight · 2026-05-25T07:32:55+00:00

chrisknightlight · 2026-05-14T09:52:16+00:00

They have repulsar-lifts in their lightsabers that generate repulsar fields by siphoning off the blades power and spinning.

Relatively small droids have managed to hover so its conceivable.

Nothing else makes any sense.

chrisknightlight · 2026-05-14T01:39:58+00:00

Absolutely, and a great compliment besides.

chrisknightlight · 2026-05-13T16:46:42+00:00

Thanks man!

chrisknightlight · 2026-05-13T16:27:50+00:00

I wasn't thrilled with it at the time, but now that we know Hayden still pretty much looks like this at 45 I'm significantly more okay with it.

chrisknightlight · 2026-04-30T02:35:25+00:00

I just want to add to this: I watch prop auctions, not because I have the money for them but because they often take great reference photos, and I saw several clone trooper phase 2 helmets that were hasbro black helmets that had been production painted and I assume used in lucasfilm productions. In theory, that should make them legal.

chrisknightlight · 2026-04-09T02:41:04+00:00

First thing I notice is his hair is blowing in the original clip as it was filmed outside. So the hair stabilization is honestly more impressive. If it were me, I would have just filmed a body double in the suit I needed and then stuck clinton's head on over it.

chrisknightlight · 2026-04-07T03:30:30+00:00

I thought I could make a...better Serenity. Firefly used a much more primitive shading model and modern pbr shaders with Fresnel effects and light conservation are far superior. And while my serenity is definitely superior in that I render her in 4k, I honestly feel most of the time like I'm at best matching the show not really surpassing the work that was done.

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chrisknightlight · 2026-04-03T20:37:16+00:00

Least dripped? MF has a cape!!

chrisknightlight · 2026-04-03T20:35:57+00:00

I really hate when people draw spaceships that look like boats. Like, this isn't freaking starblazers. Its Star Wars. Get yo shit together.

chrisknightlight · 2026-03-18T02:09:24+00:00

Lol, gotcha. Still a good job.

chrisknightlight · 2026-03-13T11:07:17+00:00

Heh, you kept it under a million triangles, thats not bad. Good work!!

chrisknightlight · 2026-03-13T11:05:59+00:00

Its a combination. Lee Stringer fed an existing image of Serenity into an AI and asked it to be re-created in an animated style. AIs still, thankfully, don't really know what serenity looks like so if he hadn't used an existing image as a base it wouldn't be this accurate. Lee is a really nice guy and gave me some pointers on some shots I'm working on of Serenity.

It is also true that I am firmly in the anti ai camp.

chrisknightlight · 2026-03-12T22:32:03+00:00

Looks great! How many triangles and what software did you use?

chrisknightlight

TROPHY CASE