How to build the Starship Enterprise in TrueSpace 3

[Roliba]

Originally Posted by scifieric

I take it you are satisfied with the bussards portion of the tutorial? LOL!

Eric, I have to make a confession here...

I started the whole Bussards thing as a bit of a lark after the roasting you gave me over mine in the WIP section. Then when the whole thing kinda exploded into a running gag, (and you stayed such a good sport) I went along with because quite frankly, it was fun .

But now that you've finally come through, I have to applaud. It really is a masterful (and deceptivly obvious -who would have though of using textures for lights?) use of the system. My hat is off to you, and I bow to you expertease.

Now, about the hanger...?

[scifieric]

Originally Posted by evil_genius_180

Now do it with lights instead of textures.

Ooooooh no! I tried that for YEARS! I'm not falling for that one again.

I actually have a couple of different warp nacelles for different effects. One of them is with lights as flares. It takes FOREVER to render. It's for those few shots where the Enterprise warp nacelles appear to have no defined lights inside.

Ugh! (Of course, it looks really cool!)

[scifieric]

Originally Posted by Roliba

Eric, I have to make a confession here...

I started the whole Bussards thing as a bit of a lark after the roasting you gave me over mine in the WIP section. Then when the whole thing kinda exploded into a running gag, (and you stayed such a good sport) I went along with because quite frankly, it was fun .

But now that you've finally come through, I have to applaud. It really is a masterful (and deceptivly obvious -who would have though of using textures for lights?) use of the system. My hat is off to you, and I bow to you expertease.

Now, about the hanger...?

I ... I gave you a roasting? I've got to go look! Muwahahahaha! Uh, I mean, I'm sorry. LOL!

Uh, wow! Thanks for the compliments! I had the idea early on but figured it would be too much work and TrueSpace should be able to duplicate the real world ... right? Boy was I wrong. I should have done this years ago and saved myself the grief!

Scene lights will dramatically effect the nacelles, so be careful. I often place a light in front of each nacelle to "bloom" the center texture.

I thought only Jedilaw was interested in the hanger area? LOL!

[evil_genius_180]

Good, it's not just me that's been trying that for years and it doesn't work. (tS 3 users, don't bother with this) What if you render with raycasting instead of scanline? Will that work any better?

[scifieric]

Ray tracing is always on in my images. If you don't use ray tracing, everything will look CGI no matter how careful you are. When programs like the dinosaur programs are rendered on a time schedule for the Dicovery Channel, I think they tend to turn off ray tracing and substitute something else. When ever the dinos open their mouths, the teeth are uniformly bright as though there are no shadows. Dead give away.

Unless you're talking about the flares. You have to turn off ray tracing for the flares and lower the brightness but increase the flare effect to maximum. The only thing is that you can't move too much in an animation because the flares do not change sizes so the further away you get from the ship, the ship gets smaller but the flares suddenly look huge!

[Roliba]

Of course, after looking at this, I'm going to go redo mine...

[scifieric]

Now that's a compliment! Thanks!

[Roliba]

Hey, what can I say... your's is better.

[scifieric]

Just a couple of quick renders. I didn't match the lighting or the camera position but I figure it's close enough to get the idea. With the texture effects and transparencies for the warp engines, a little manipulation of the resulting image should get close to the desired effect.

[evil_genius_180]

I wasn't talking about using or not using ray tracing. I'm talking about using a hollowed out sphere so there's a surface to reflect the light back and use raycasting, not ray tracing. Ray tracing is a must-have for rendering with any seriousness. Raycasting is an alternative to scanline visibility and is supposed to make your renders look better, by more accurately simulating how lights work. I'm wondering if that would effect how modeled lights work in a bussard. I might have to do some tests later.