Kobol Studios Animation WIPs

[Pearse]

Well you're certainly organised. It's very interesting to see your journey as you overcome each hiccup in the process and hopefully some of these problems with help out others who are dealing with the same issues.

[Mr. Wilde]

Very nice.

Originally Posted by Adalla

And finally the crazy BSG shot with particle FX all over the place.

Does anyone know how that shot was done? Looks like a real photograph of earth clouds combined with CG elements. Or is it completely computer generated?

[Adalla]

Pearse, yeah I post the problems I have hoping someone will help, though I usually end up figuring it out after spending enough time with the problem and doing a little web browsing or asking on other forums. Not a lot of Lightwave users here, and not a lot of folk that work with lighting and animation, or maybe they just dont wanna help Either way, I post the solutions as well, so it might help others with similar problems And to show eyecandy

Mr. Wilde, my guess is they took a regular planet with some textures on it, and everything on top is particle FX and hypervoxels is my guess. To me it seems they actually created all those clouds in lightwave.

And that was Zoic who did the shot, and well Zoic are the Gods of VFX :P

[Adalla]

Okies, well they say when you just lose some motivation for something, or get tired of doing something, they say to work on something else for a little bit and come back to it. So I'm giving a little break from the nuke and engine lighting rigs, and I went ahead and imported Coxxon's Galactica into LW.

It was a little bit of a challenge for me, as I had to take the 4 layers (base, ribs, armor, guns) (which were all one layer when imported from 3DS) seperate them and recombine them. That took some work, but I think I got it.

Now I'm working at lighting the galactica, and it's a bit of a challenge because Coxxon's low poly only has 3 surfaces for the entire galactica. So when you increase specularity on one thing, you end up getting specularity on other things you didnt want.

Plus, I'm still pretty new to all the surfacing and lighting stuff.

Anyways, here is a test render and the reference image.





The Zoic model has about 2,920,000 more polys and more than 3 surfaces :P So cant really compare But I'm trying my best.

I'll be tweaking the surface settings a bit more, and then proceed to lighting the ship.

[Adalla]

Here's another test render after tweaking surface settings some more. Not sure if I can make it look much better than that with those textures and only 3 surfaces. I not terribly fond of the texturing between the ribs, maybe I'm doing something wrong. Oh well, gotta move on. This will do for now.

[Adalla]

Here is a test render of the lighting on Galactica. No where near done, but a start.

[Adalla]

Some more lights on the Galactica.







Feedback would be nice...

[Pearse]

I'm kinda curious why you're converting Coxxon's Galactica, why not just use a higher poly model that's already in existence?

[Adalla]

Well the only other high poly I'm aware of that people have used here on SMF and that I've downloaded, is Wil Jasper's Galactica. However, the thing is in 300 pieces, which I dont want to spend a few dozen hours putting together, and I dont really know how to texture high poly models just yet.

So if anyone has Wil Jasper's model (or another freely available high poly Galactica that is in one piece) in one piece then I'd use it if I can figure out how to texture it.

I'm just not good at modeling and texturing, and Coxxon's fleet was the easiest to deal with, not to mention it saves up render time.

I tried also finding a high poly Raptor (protagonist of this project), but it needs to have textures applied, and I have no idea how to apply the textures to only one surface.

Basically...I'm learning as I go, and working with what I have.

[Starship]

I would like to give my oppinion, but all that I can see are red X for now...