do the internals need to be bright white? ( i know ur just starting on them.. just saying ) looks to clinical/hospitally.. some red light maybe ?? on some of em?
looking great sir!
By internals, you mean lights? Well, as Kirk liked to point out, duplicating Earth conditions of night and day as closely as possible is very important. I'm guessing it's about noon? Actually, I was planning on making the workbee dock interiors red (not that they will be all that stand-out visible), but I just haven't done it yet. I'm also planning on darkening the blue glow surfaces a little, and perhaps putting some kind of grid texture on the ceiling lighting to help break it up. It will probably just get washed out at these settings though, but I won't know until I try.
Tobian: Familiar eh? The workbee docks were in fact a happy mistake. I was just trying to make use of some otherwise dead space. After slicing my partitions and cutting out the raw bee shapes, I cleaned up my points. I suddenly realized I had a rather interesting pattern, and after a few minor tweaks I'd fashioned a useful framing mechanism.
Well, I changed the lights a little. I dimmed them in the observation deck, made them red in the workbee dock, and made the environmental containment field emitters more noticeably blue (in latest image). I also added a few more details: exterior landing lights, structural frames inside the observation deck, fully recessed cargo holds (only in the first section), several large elevator platforms, and a few other minor tweaks.
Basil, what are your radiosity settings? I am just marvelling at the smoothness of your concave angles, as I always have issues there!
Anyway, yes, looks superb! all it needs are glossy reflections, but you can thank me for horrible render times if you do those You can probably use some of this work for the interiors of your ships too.
Basil, what are your radiosity settings? I am just marvelling at the smoothness of your concave angles, as I always have issues there!
Anyway, yes, looks superb! all it needs are glossy reflections, but you can thank me for horrible render times if you do those You can probably use some of this work for the interiors of your ships too.
Well, flying blind as I often do...
Final Gather- Interpolated, Ambient Occlusion, Use Gradients.
Intensity- 280%
Indirect Bounces- 4
Rays Per Evaluation- 1000
Sec Bounce Rays- 200
Ang Tolerance- 32 deg
Min Pixel Spacing- 0.5
Max Pixel Spacing- 8.0
Multiplier- 100% (actually no idea what that does)
I love experimenting with this stuff, but I have to take such long breaks between intense exposure, most of it fails to sink in.
Cheers Basil. Hmm it must just be the size of your luminous areas which make it smooth, my settings are already higher than that
NB: Multiplier is the resolution of the radiosity solution. For example if you set it to 50% it's like rendering a 50% smaller image. It can make the renders a lot faster, though you lose some contact shadows.
A quick little diversion. Something I could let render while I was demolishing my master bath. An experimental attempt to visualize the McCook approaching Starstation India. No bells and whistles yet, just playing with motion.
Is was made to go with music, but I haven't figured out all the details of animation editing yet.
Added a little bit of light to the station's interior (in places) and added some blinking navigation lights to the McCook. I also rendered the stars in as a separate backdrop and beefed up some of their glows a little bit, but it is hard to tell with Youtube processing. File went from 464 MB to 2.6 MB.
I also did a version in iMovie that added a little TNG music but the visual quality really suffered. EVERY single star just vanished from the scene, so I'll have to figure that one out. Before I go to the trouble of adding credits and things I want to make sure it is worth the effort.
Looks much better. The flashing lights look great! the only thing which really spoils it is the excessively dark shadows in there (given the ammount of bounce light from the bright white station everything should be recieving), but animated radiosity is not practical (and not very stable or good in LW). Perhaps some cheating non shadow casting lights distributed round the hull, with falloff to fake some light bounce?
Thanks. Yes, good suggestions Tobian. Cheating (in this case) is definitely the way to go.
I planned on switching the secondary light (purplish from below) into a dome light eventually, after I get a few more kinks worked out (and when I can sit back and let a 40 second video render for 24 hours). Seems like the ship itself should be pouring some light as well onto the interior of that pier when it slides in. Parenting a soft dome light to the ship and facing it slightly upward to port might help too.
I Hear All Hallows Eve is when the dead will rise, so for this Halloween my zombie thread and corpse of a travel pod model return for some fun. It's been a while since I posted, but I really wanted to finish my travel pod. After some recent upgrades, I thought I'd post my WIP images. With any luck they will be buzzing around my space station by Christmas.
I really need to start building me some workbees and inspection pods! Nice work. The materials could use some refining, with some subtle variations on the panel spec etc, but it's a solid model!
Looks wonderful Basill. Always a treat seeing new stuff from you.:)
Thanks! Of course the inspection pod isn't too new, but it sure feels new after a year and a half hiatus. It's the one thing I wish I had when I was working on my drydock shots.
I really need to start building me some workbees and inspection pods! Nice work. The materials could use some refining, with some subtle variations on the panel spec etc, but it's a solid model!
Ooooo. I would love to see some bees and pods on you station!
I agree about the materials, and I am looking forward to tweaking around with that. Currently it's all model, and other than raw color and the luminosity settings on the few glowing items, I've haven't paid much attention to surface texturing yet (my weakest area as you know). Specularity and gloss settings are only minorly adjusted so they are not in that flat default funk. I've also let out the slack in the global illumination settings in order to speed up rendering times since these are just WIP images. It's fast, but I think it allows for some really cooky results in the render, like those knobby things appearing to glow rather than just be a shiny metal.
I suspect that those "subtle variations on the panel spec" you speak of might actually help me with some of the smoothing errors I've noticed creeping in since I started liberally cutting panel details all across the surface? We'll see.
Haha yeah welcome to my world. Cutting diagonals across curves surfaces always ends up in smoothing anomalies! Trouble is there isn't a simple solution, though, I do think you should put a small micro-bevel on the panels, to add a bit of light-catching and shadow. It will also help to hide some of those anomalies, as a nice side effect!
Been a while since I posted any of my work here, so I thought I would add a new shot of my station, since it's a fairly large modification.
It may not seem like much but I added quite a few view ports to the inner surfaces of the large arch towers, a task I had been dreading and procrastinating for some time. This baby is now too large polywise to be rendered all at once unless it is stripped to the barest of details, and there is still much to do. But as Tobian recently told me, it's becoming nearly as Sisyphean as his Pluto Station. I hear ya dude. I hear ya.
Don't know if you have got Lightwave 11 but if all 4 arms are more or less identical, then you can start using instances. For example, if you create the entire hierarchy of the arm as a single null, with all of the object layer pieces below it, you can create an instance clone of that null, activate their hierarchy switch, and everything will be instanced. I long since divided my station up into modules which could be cloned in layout, to make the model files much smaller, but instancing just meant it now takes up a lot less memory in layout and at render time too! I can spot a lot of places where that could prove useful to you!
Oh, yes. That could prove useful indeed. Alas, I only have 9.X something... 5 or 6. Not sure off the top of my head. I take it an upgrade would be prohibitively expensive?
Don't know if this is an ability in Lightwave, but something called n Maya referencing. in Maya, you can load up different files in too 1 master file, so lets say you have 4 ships, 1 per pier, and then all the mid poly rooms, then the work bays. basically in maya each section is a different File, not layer. making sure its in the same location, xyz, place as the master file you reference each file ie ship file, interior file, etc. in to a master file to render from. you can't make changes to the child files from the master files, so you would have to work in each child file to make corrections, Or have all the lights etc. in the master file. saves bunches on polys and you can load Massive amounts of stuff in to the master file.
don't know if Lightwave does this or similar. but would seem to be a something to look up since you have a crap load of stuff to display/render.
The Lightwave scene file is a sort of referencing system by design: all the geometry assets are called from their respective location within a model (you can load layers from inside the model and it treats them as separate objects). Unfortunately the Lightwave scene file doesn't support referencing anything but geometry objects, so it doesn't handle hierarchies, rigging, lights, cameras etc, as a referencable thing. Lightwave 11 does geometry instancing (sadly not lights, cameras etc) but it will copy any rigging in that hierarchy of objects, so if you want a complex mechanical array that works fine
Not sure how much the upgrade is, but it'll be less with you having 9.x than it would to buy it outright.
Thanks guys. Wow. A lot of tech to filter through there.
Hey Tobian. That instancing is cool and it looks like the feature (which I assume is intrinsic in LW 11?) might be a plug-in possible for earlier varieties of Lightwave. Still not cheap from what I can gather, but might still be cheaper than an upgrade. Either way it's out of my range for a while.
Shame. You could give Dpinstance a go http://dpont.pagesperso-orange.fr/plugins/DP_Instance.html but it's not intrinsic to LW, as a plugin and so is a lot slower to render, because it uses volumetrics. the native instances of LW11 are a lot faster to render, and naturally save a lot of memory.
Posts
By internals, you mean lights? Well, as Kirk liked to point out, duplicating Earth conditions of night and day as closely as possible is very important.
Tobian: Familiar eh? The workbee docks were in fact a happy mistake. I was just trying to make use of some otherwise dead space. After slicing my partitions and cutting out the raw bee shapes, I cleaned up my points. I suddenly realized I had a rather interesting pattern, and after a few minor tweaks I'd fashioned a useful framing mechanism.
Here is that image I started this morning.
looking good!
Well, I changed the lights a little. I dimmed them in the observation deck, made them red in the workbee dock, and made the environmental containment field emitters more noticeably blue (in latest image). I also added a few more details: exterior landing lights, structural frames inside the observation deck, fully recessed cargo holds (only in the first section), several large elevator platforms, and a few other minor tweaks.
Anyway, yes, looks superb! all it needs are glossy reflections, but you can thank me for horrible render times if you do those
i loooovee that game! and i see what youre talking about, lol. too bad RA3 was a bit of a letdown
Well, flying blind as I often do...
Final Gather- Interpolated, Ambient Occlusion, Use Gradients.
Intensity- 280%
Indirect Bounces- 4
Rays Per Evaluation- 1000
Sec Bounce Rays- 200
Ang Tolerance- 32 deg
Min Pixel Spacing- 0.5
Max Pixel Spacing- 8.0
Multiplier- 100% (actually no idea what that does)
I love experimenting with this stuff, but I have to take such long breaks between intense exposure, most of it fails to sink in.
NB: Multiplier is the resolution of the radiosity solution. For example if you set it to 50% it's like rendering a 50% smaller image. It can make the renders a lot faster, though you lose some contact shadows.
Is was made to go with music, but I haven't figured out all the details of animation editing yet.
I also did a version in iMovie that added a little TNG music but the visual quality really suffered. EVERY single star just vanished from the scene, so I'll have to figure that one out. Before I go to the trouble of adding credits and things I want to make sure it is worth the effort.
Here's the latest experiment.
I planned on switching the secondary light (purplish from below) into a dome light eventually, after I get a few more kinks worked out (and when I can sit back and let a 40 second video render for 24 hours). Seems like the ship itself should be pouring some light as well onto the interior of that pier when it slides in. Parenting a soft dome light to the ship and facing it slightly upward to port might help too.
Looks great sir! glad to see you postin! some great stuff on your blog too! the azure and mccook is my work wallpaper!
Really? Well that makes me all giggly inside. Thanks!
Ooooo. I would love to see some bees and pods on you station!
I agree about the materials, and I am looking forward to tweaking around with that. Currently it's all model, and other than raw color and the luminosity settings on the few glowing items, I've haven't paid much attention to surface texturing yet (my weakest area as you know). Specularity and gloss settings are only minorly adjusted so they are not in that flat default funk. I've also let out the slack in the global illumination settings in order to speed up rendering times since these are just WIP images. It's fast, but I think it allows for some really cooky results in the render, like those knobby things appearing to glow rather than just be a shiny metal.
I suspect that those "subtle variations on the panel spec" you speak of might actually help me with some of the smoothing errors I've noticed creeping in since I started liberally cutting panel details all across the surface? We'll see.
It may not seem like much but I added quite a few view ports to the inner surfaces of the large arch towers, a task I had been dreading and procrastinating for some time. This baby is now too large polywise to be rendered all at once unless it is stripped to the barest of details, and there is still much to do. But as Tobian recently told me, it's becoming nearly as Sisyphean as his Pluto Station. I hear ya dude. I hear ya.
don't know if Lightwave does this or similar. but would seem to be a something to look up since you have a crap load of stuff to display/render.
Not sure how much the upgrade is, but it'll be less with you having 9.x than it would to buy it outright.
That station is looking a beauty!
Hey Tobian. That instancing is cool and it looks like the feature (which I assume is intrinsic in LW 11?) might be a plug-in possible for earlier varieties of Lightwave. Still not cheap from what I can gather, but might still be cheaper than an upgrade. Either way it's out of my range for a while.