That looks pretty awesome! Keep it up, man!

Dude! That GIMP version looks amazing!
I'm loving the motion streak/blur thing in the first picture, and the masking effects seems flawless.
Fantastic editing my dear sir!

The Vegas attempt also looks nice, but you're right, the green spill in this picture seems to be fatal.
Another side effect I just noticed is that the Vegas Chroma turns her blue-ish (resembling Colombia's slight recolor) rather than the more yellow-ish tint of the NX-01, which GIMP retains. A touch of color-correction can fix that, but it's something else to keep in mind. Thanks for helping me see that!

This was, very much, just a quick test shot. I literally laid the poster board on the floor beneath my ceiling fan light and snapped the picture on my phone. I don't think it'll be hard to manage some better lighting in the future. The model was about 1 1/2 feet from the screen, so moving it further away should help with the spill. I've got two poster boards, and can always grab two more if necessary to make it big enough to get that far away.

While I hate to invest the time to GIMP every frame, my mind goes back reading about all the time consuming effects work Smeagol and Nick Durron put into their early films. If I'm going to attempt this kind of thing, I might as well go all-out and do it right.

Over the next few days I'll try to figure out better lighting, then do a test clip of it actually in motion. Thanks for the feedback!

You have to use BBCode to post pictures on the forum. First, upload your image to an image sharing site like imgur or flickr. Then, copy and paste the link into your post and put an img tag around it.

For example: [img]urlexample[/img]

Wow! Ya'll are having a lot more success than I am!

Adding lights to the lights on the ship was a great idea, although the rim light may be turned up a bit much.

I filmed a few shots of the NX-01 in motion last night, but the vain attempts at chroma in Vegas continue to completely fail and once again I didn't get far enough away to eliminate the green reflections on the model. The first one isn't masked, the second is. However, neither seems to be working. Saturday afternoon may open up enough to try GIMPing something, we'll see.

I'm also considering trying my hand at doing the effects shots in Blender instead, but know virtually nothing about how to work that software, so that may not go anywhere.

On your youtube test, it says 'Choma keyed in Vegas', why are you chroma keying if it is a CG render straight out of blender? Surely you have an alpha channel already baked in?

Wow, those bricks look really realistic! Keep up the great work.

Finally got the stars figured out.
Blender has a crazy learning curve, especially the particles, but once you figure it out, it's not too bad.
Thankfully there are a lot of tutorials on Youtube.

Next step: Figuring out what kind of lighting I want.

Also, if you have discord I might be able to help more if your interested.

@The_Director, Thanks for the offer of help! I've got some craziness these next few weeks with church and family obligations, but I'll certainly keep that offer for help in mind for when the schedule lightens up.

Rather than green screen the Blender renders, I'm just doing it all in Blender. In the above picture, the background is black, while the stars are particles in the scene. This seems far better than bothering to render, then match the camera motions and try to add stars in Vegas. I did take your advice and set the resolution up. Thankfully, the GPU tip is one that I saw before. You're right, it does help! (Not much, since my laptop isn't built for heavy graphics, but every little bit is nice.)

Raytistic, Right now, I've got the samples sitting at 1,000. It's taking roughly 10 minutes a frame, which is killer when the clip is 140 frames long. I tried with higher samples before, but it was simply far too slow for my liking. The lighting setup has been adjusted since that frame was rendered, things aren't as dark and grainy anymore so 1,000 samples may suffice for now. However, you're right, it would help the quality.

Other than rendering the newest draft of the scene, which can be done at night or while I'm at work, little will be done with this through the holidays. However, it's been a great learning experience. Thank you to all for your tips and encouragement! I'll be sure to post the video whenever it's finally done.