MDS Ship Ideas

[cavebear]

sorceress21, I was using the standard setup that came with it. So I vastly increased the settings - huge amount compared to the standard and things have started to get better. Still no glow for the engines but at least I have colour.

But that is another problem. The materials imported from SU are shown and include the same name that they appear in SU but there is actually no colour. So all the colour you see I assigned in Kerk. I must be doing something wrong in the export process

I'm getting tired so I'm off to bed. I'll fiddle around with the setting more when I get up

Thanks for the help so far!

[fongsaunder]

Wait, you exported your SU model in Kerky and get no colour? If you did, you must have clicked "Export as clay model", dont tick that, or you'll get a colourless model.

[cavebear]

Originally Posted by fongsaunder

Wait, you exported your SU model in Kerky and get no colour? If you did, you must have clicked "Export as clay model", dont tick that, or you'll get a colourless model.

Aha! Did it without exporting as a clay object and it worked. But for one tiny little detail. The clear glass did not work right. The colour exported but the transparency did not. So from a distance the glass looks right but as you get closer you realize that you can't see through it into the inside!

sorceress21, With the ship exporting , for the most part correctly, what do you do to get things like your landing light strips to light up?

[sorceress21]

Right click on the material you want to light up and open it for editing. Then right click on the word Radiance under the Self-Luminance box, then selct "Assign color", pick a color on the wheel, then click accept. You can now adjust the power of the self luminance. You can end up getting some pretty cool results:

Here is a preview of a top-secret project that shows just how cool SU with Kerk can be ( I never let the anti-aliasing finish here cause it was taking hours so there is some raggedness to the edges but here is a cockpit panel lit at night:

[cavebear]

Thanks sorceress21 I'll be trying that out tomorrow. But for now I spent 5 hours rendering a new pic and put it in the very first post of the thread then deleted all old pics up to message 66 I believe. Was running out of file space!

[Dannage]

What's this new big ship then eh? I would have thought the next model for you to build was a smaller shuttle either to dock with the hospital ship or the Iron Sun. Once you get a small ship, see, you can really get a sense of scale for all the other models.

Looks like you're having fun trying this new process but really, if it's taking 5 hours to render something with... How many poly's is your hospital ship? It shouldn't be taking 5 hours to render, I know that much!!

[Ozylot]

Originally Posted by Dannage

....
Looks like you're having fun trying this new process but really, if it's taking 5 hours to render something with... How many poly's is your hospital ship? It shouldn't be taking 5 hours to render, I know that much!!

It is because kerkythea calculates physically accurate lighting, and when using self illuminating materials each triangle in every polygon is counted as an area light and has to do photon calculations accordingly.

my suggestion then is whenever possible... use omni's spots or projector lights.

[chrono]

To be honest cavebear using Self-Lumience Materials is a bad move because they act like Area lights and often multiple render times between 4-32 times the normal render time. Because each face acts like 1-32 different lights (depending on render type) so when you have 4 panels that have 8 sides each and since Kerky trigulates each face you could have 48-1,500 lights being calculated in the scene in addition to whatever other lights you've placed in the scene. Not something to worry about if you've got a render farm. You can still use SLM's but use them smartly or they'll burn you.

I would've suggested that you use an Ambient and Diaeletric Contant shader but since Kerky is a Physical Renderer it doesn't allow that "cheat" to be used.

[cavebear]

Dannage and Ozylot,

Thanks for the comments I still have a lot to learn and to play around with The render was done in TurboSketch not in Kerkythea though. The reason for the length of time was having 4 ships in the pic and the hospital ships lights.

chrono,

I didn't know that about using Self-Lumience Materials But I did try it out in my Iron Sun Carrier for the main engines (just a quick render, didn't save it) and it looked really good.

My biggest problem right now involves transparent materials. Just the colour of the transparent material is being exported but not the transparentcy itself. It comes out as a solid colour.

[Ozylot]

Try setting a refraction color and use an Index of Refraction of 1.0
That should make something have transparency. The alternative is to use the 'thin glass' or 'glass' materials that come packed with Kerky.