›

Greetings!

Welcome to Scifi-Meshes.com! Click one of these buttons to join in on the fun.

Sign In Register

Quick Links

3DRevision

ZanussiZanussi0 Posts: 0Member
edited February 2014 in Work in Progress #1
After a long foray into Naval CAD stuff I have come back to sci-fi, I decided a simple project to update my tired looking CD label, producing it in 3DS would give me the opportunity to print from different perspectives to add some variety.

If memory serves me it was originally made on Paintshop by merging some internet images, back getting such an image was a task in itself, downloading as text in sections, stitching it back together and then coding it back to an image file. The label was originally for floppy disks!

Unable to get the latest version of 3DS to work on my antique machine I settled for 2008 and worked through a few tutorials to refresh myself, decided to use a couple of the Tutorials to help me produce a quick result... Ha ha!
103767.JPG
Post edited by Zanussi on
Tagged:

Posts

  • ZanussiZanussi0 Posts: 0Member
    #2
    One of the Tutorials was titled "Space" and provided all you need to reproduce Mars and it's two moons: Deimos and Phobos. I decided to adapt the image to match a story I am working on, Mars becomes a luxury world, courtesy of adding some oceans and changing the deserts to green, I also added rings. Because I like rings.

    Most of this was done in Photoshop and mapped onto a simple sphere in 3DS, the rings employ the noise and speckle effects in PS, the planet a couple of colour masks.

    That was easy enough, what proved hard was getting a shadow of the planet on the rings, managed it eventually with photometric lighting and lots of monkeying with the contrast on the rings. Good tip is to make sure you keep a copy of the full stack of levels in PS, makes going back and making changes a lot easier.

    Getting the rings right though left me with hard shadows of the rings on New Mars, need to look into that, the obvious thing would be to blur them in PS, but that would lose me the "posability" of the scene, some sort of atmosphere distortion is needed to blur the shadows.
    103768.jpg
  • ZanussiZanussi0 Posts: 0Member
    #3
    My luxury world is peopled by the rich and privileged, a paradise. To keep it that way all industry is abolished to an industrial moon, "Gomrath" Actually our own moon, not got this right yet either, I cannot seem to get a balance between the lights of the industrial complexes and the reflection of the moon surface, one or the other, not both. I suspect a shadow map might be needed, but never done one of those, will get back to it.

    The lights are a mix, I made an opaque mask by "dotting" around the main craters and then linking them with roads, putting a light source inside the moon gives me the basic lights, but they looked too regular, so painting coloured dots and rings onto the crater map and adding a bump broke things up nicely, giving the effect of different intensities and obscurities caused by the terrain. But the crater detail is almost totally in dark, I should have half the moon in light, just cannot get it right yet.
    103769.jpg
  • ZanussiZanussi0 Posts: 0Member
    #4
    The second moon is Ariel, here the shadows are working fine, so far all I have done is wrap a picture of pack ice around a globe, Ariel is the base of the weather control for the paradise world so I will be adding some giant machines later, in ruins as the peasants blew it up, plunging the paradise into an ice age from which it has now emerged naturally.
    103770.jpg
  • ZanussiZanussi0 Posts: 0Member
    #5
    Stepping back to view the system, the starfield is proving difficult, make it more interesting and it becomes too distracting, a lot of people seem to use thick cosmic clouds to get around it, but I could not bear the derision from my Astronomer friends if I did that.
    103771.jpg
  • ZanussiZanussi0 Posts: 0Member
    #6
    The second tutorial is for a P38 Lightning which I am cheerfully bashing around at the moment, intending to make it the foreground.

    Here I have turned the starboard propeller sponson into a turbofan with wrap around oxygen injection tanks for operating in space. The exhaust is vectored with trim tabs in the jet stream from the re-positioned tail gear.

    The livery reflects that it was originally intended to operate during the ice age, but with technology now in the hands of a Catholic theocracy the design has sunk into dogmatic tradition. The emblem is for the Knights Templar who conduct bombing raids against the godless on the one time paradise.

    The fighter - btw - is a Fulgar, get it?
    103772.jpg
  • ZanussiZanussi0 Posts: 0Member
    #7
    That should be Fulgur, oops. Here is the nearly finished result, still got some flying lights and stuff to add. I have reversed the wings and shortened them, the gondola has been made more simple and equipped with two twin 30mm cannon for ground straffing.Fulgur.jpg
    103977.jpg
  • ZanussiZanussi0 Posts: 0Member
    #8
    A peek underneath at the external weapons, this ship is equipped for a typical spoiling raid prior to the schism between Church and the Militant Knights, she carries a deliberately dirty atomic bomb with the inner casing made of U238. A raid would be launched after the Knights Hospital plotted a population confluence. Earlier methods of rocket bombs proved ineffective as the heathens learned to decoy such attacks. So Templar Knights would fly down for a closer recon and rip up underground work with their nukes, then spray a deadly mix of Spanish Flu, Anthrax and other nasties, any fleeing survivors would be hunted with incendiary and high explosive mixed cannon shells.
    External Weapons.jpg
    103978.jpg
  • spacefighterspacefighter2 Posts: 0Member
    #9
    always nice to see a funny slogan on a warhead. nice work on the weapons pod, bump mapped or full geometry modelled.
  • ZanussiZanussi0 Posts: 0Member
    #10
    Bump mapped, and thanks, was worried I might cause some offence in some circles, but it is cogent to the story.

    Been a while, I went to school to study shadows, the methods for constructing a world are varied and fascinating but I have kept the colours simple, the clouds are a study all by themselves and in the end it took using two light sources to simulate the sun to balance out the requirements for the clouds v surface, thankfully there is a cute setting in 3d Max photo lights to ignore some objects.
    Jerusalem.jpg

    The marble floating in space effect was obtained by adding an atmosphere sphere with a falloff filter applied, increasing the size improves the effect, but loses realism so I had to trim it close to the planet sphere.
    104642.jpg
  • ZanussiZanussi0 Posts: 0Member
    #11
    Here is the industrial moon revisited, I abandoned the attempt to illuminate it internally, I finally realised that the opaque mask on the sphere might look 3D, but it only acted 2D so masking on the "far" side of the moon was also showing through on the "front" side, what I was after would have needed compartmenting the interior of the moon and pocketing a light source in each, yuk!

    Instead I took an aerial shot of city lights and used it as a self illumination map around the whole moon, I still could not get shadows to work right with that arrangement so I cheated and moved the moon out of the sun cone, a future project will involve a Trantor style planet and I will revisit the issue then.

    CD Label Background.jpg

    The Fulgar re-enters the scene, at first I tried to be clever and have it lit by planet light, it worked great until I shrank the image to label side, then it was just a smudge, so I have added another light source to make it clearer.
    104643.jpg
  • ZanussiZanussi0 Posts: 0Member
    #12
    And the final label, with the beauty that when I get bored with it I can change the perspective ;)

    CD Label Complete.jpg
    104644.jpg
Sign In or Register to comment.