AMAZING ENTERPRISE E MODEL

[SKO]

I assume most of this crowd has already seen this but wow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NXKzJjgbVI&t=82s

[el gato]

I'm only going to focus on the positive (there were a couple of curious choices this modeler made). The lighting overall was impressive, especially for making the window lighting scale-appropriate. I've only seen a handful of lit models that have that feature.

[MadManMUC]

window lighting scale-appropriate.

Err ... not quite sure I follow you, here ...

[el gato]

If you were to scale up the lighting of a lot of lit models to their true size, you would find that the windows are way too bright. The best real world example is an airplane at night. When you look up a plane flying overhead, you rarely see the windows. Even though the cabin is lit, the brightness does not carry across distances. There's a technical term for it, but it essentially says that the brightness is cut in half every time you double the distance from the source. So an appropriately lit model is said to be one where the windows are lit but not too brightly, so that you can see they're lit when your close to the model but that brightness slowly disappears as you get farther away from it.

This, for example, is not lit scale-appropriate:



Now, two caveats. First, the model was over-exposed since the picture had to be taken in the dark. We truly don't know what the real illumination level is from the picture, but it can be assumed the window lighting as captured here is nevertheless very bright. So consider this "for illustration purposes only" as if we're looking at this model in real life. Second, I'm not ragging on the modeler since lighting a ship is still impressive. It is a skill I don't have. But that amount of brightness would render you blind if you scaled it up to 100%

[MadManMUC]

Aaaaaaah, understood.

I'm with you, I've no skill in lighting (yet), but I suppose this is why good modellers use resisters in their projects, to dim the lighting to something appropriate to the scale.

There, I learned something new today!