If this was a shot in a feature film I'd tell you that the ship does not look like it's 'in' the plate.
Don't take this personally, or a slam on your work. I'm going to give you a bit of a laundry list of things that will improve your shot. VFX is won & lost in the details, so you have a number of them to hit in order to make the shot work. No single fix will do it, you need to hit a bunch of things to dial the shot in.
NOTES & SUGGESTIONS
- Lighting direction: The silent killer. If this is wrong, the shot will never quite look right. Your spaceship appears to be lit under ideal conditions to show off the modeling and textures. Try to put the desire to see your hard work (in model & paint) aside and make integration your only consideration: When I study the bridge span and the FG railings, I see the sun direction (the key) as coming from the top/left side of frame, & toward camera. Now look at your ship, compare it to the bridge, cars, and FG railing. It appears your lighting direction is incorrect because the side of the ship (particularly the fuselage) needs to be much darker.
- It appears your ship is casting shadows on itself. This indicates a sunny day, but the BG plate is overcast. As a result, there would be no direct shadows, just key & fill sides with an ambient occlusion pass blended in to add some localized density.
- The Ship lighting is the wrong color. - Suggestion: Turn off all the engine lighting. Then, match the ship's lighting and levels and color to the concrete bridge. Match it exactly and go from there. Look closely at the bridge; concrete is usually grey, but in the plate, it's very blue (Do the same to you ship). After your levels and color match the plate exactly, you can carefully bring up some lighting from the engines. The idea is to suggest engine light without ruining how the ship blends with the plate.
-The engine light is too large. That could easily come down by at least 70%.
- Consider removing the lens flare. Although a lens flare used to be a fashionable element in CG composites it's use (Read: over use) has spoiled it as a VFX go-to.
- If you keep the lens flare (and I hope you don't) , It's the wrong color. Your ship, in turn, is polluted with this color, and doesn't fit the color temp of the surrounding plate. Yes, I know the engine light creates it's own color, but this version is way too big.
- Have the ship create a lighting effect on the BG plate. My suggestion is that you lower the ship a little bit, and then add a broken reflection of the engine light in the water. Nothing fancy here, just take the CG ship element, duplicate it, mirror it vertically, displace heavily it with the water, and comp it by pulling a key on the water and screening your reflection mostly through the darker part of the water.
- Add a little blur & nose to the ship.
- I disagree with the above notes about animation. Animation is physics & performance, not integration.
Regards,
Thomas
I will start doing some editing when I'm home.
