Bridge Commander Central
Recreational Forums => Art Forum => Topic started by: Nighthawk on April 16, 2007, 05:45:01 PM
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I'm posting some renders I did playing with 3DStudio and BC models.
be free to dl them as desktop wallpapers, if you want, but keep in mind that they are actually using other modder's ships, so you're not allowed to upload them as yours, nor I'm claiming ownership of them, just being credited as maker of the pic.
(http://img156.imageshack.us/img156/7109/odysseykd0.jpg) (http://img156.imageshack.us/img156/7109/odysseykd0.jpg) (http://img120.imageshack.us/img120/6763/bozemanaescapeyv8.jpg) (http://img120.imageshack.us/img120/6763/bozemanaescapeyv8.jpg) (http://img171.imageshack.us/img171/5180/fleet1km4.jpg) (http://img171.imageshack.us/img171/5180/fleet1km4.jpg)
(http://img510.imageshack.us/img510/6566/svyb1.jpg) (http://img510.imageshack.us/img510/6566/svyb1.jpg)
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yah the pic isn't showing up.
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*fixed*
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Poor Odyssey. :(
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Poor Odyssey. :(
LOL
*taken as Pic caption*
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"Sir" I do believe we are fucked
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very cool pics
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Thanks. I always try to do good stuff.....
more to come on next days, I hope...
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The one of the odissey has a great angle and FX, just the bump on the galaxy that looks extremely wierd... you know the actual ship is barely bumped.
The second with the intrepid has the better lighting of all, the only 2 downpoints on it are the fact you're using a extremely low model (p81 isn't it?) and that you nede to adjust the specular level / maps on max differently from bc to make the different surfaces to act differently in max.
The fleet one is a good idea, and the main source light is good at the flare, just the back of it looks strange, perhaps because the ships should be barely back lighten, perhaps giving it more contrast.
As for the credit part, what is commonly accepted in all Cg forums is that, whne you use someone's else stuff, you actually write in the pic the credits to the model author and to yourself as the image author.
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The one of the odissey has a great angle and FX, just the bump on the galaxy that looks extremely wierd... you know the actual ship is barely bumped.
The second with the intrepid has the better lighting of all, the only 2 downpoints on it are the fact you're using a extremely low model (p81 isn't it?) and that you nede to adjust the specular level / maps on max differently from bc to make the different surfaces to act differently in max.
The fleet one is a good idea, and the main source light is good at the flare, just the back of it looks strange, perhaps because the ships should be barely back lighten, perhaps giving it more contrast.
As for the credit part, what is commonly accepted in all Cg forums is that, whne you use someone's else stuff, you actually write in the pic the credits to the model author and to yourself as the image author.
heh, yeah, I know.....
those errors are kinda intentionally done, my screen is a bit too dark, so I need to adjust the brightness on max to see what I'm doing, and it affects the pic.
the next one will be closer to the shows
the intrepid is WTR's intrepid, with a retexture to white that I forgot who made and I even forgot I had on my HD until I tried to load it in Max. the Bozeman reg is mine.
the speculars on it were set to be used on a darker scene, but I liked this one, so here it is. in Max, I have to combine speculars and glosiness on a metallic material to get a nice effect. I'll post one with a Defiant that I could render nicely :)
and the fleet was planned to have indeed barely ambience lighting, but, as I said, I was nearly missing what I was doing, so I added more brightness.
these are, I hope, storyboards of a trailer I'm working on. (huh, self-advertising anyone? :D) Or the fleet one, at least.....
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It's amazing how all the crews on the galaxy class ship just happened to be using all the exact same rooms at the exact same time. :D
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It's amazing how all the crews on the galaxy class ship just happened to be using all the exact same rooms at the exact same time. :D
I call it coordination :funny
I've been busy lately, but I could throw up one pic more while testing MentalRay deeper.
added the CG Sovereign one
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Nice pics. The Odyssey angles and damage are perfect! You just need to work on the FX more.
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Looks like you're doing pretty well. With practice, you'll be pro in no time.
And now a shameless plug for my latest render...
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Damn nice, CI.
That stock sun/lens flare effect drags quality down abit, tho.
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Looks like that sovy is about to dish some hurt...
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Looks like you're doing pretty well. With practice, you'll be pro in no time.
And now a shameless plug for my latest render...
that's one of the problems I'm dealing with when it comes to lighting. the hull looks like metal, but it actualy isn't. if we go to the real fact, it's plastic. so I have to texture it like plastic, and it pisses me off 'cuz I can't get the lighting to look right.
I thought that using a glossiness map would help to get that metallic effect, but I had no time to test it yet.
did you use video post in that pic?
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I did use Video Post for the stars, glows and other effects. As for the specularity and glossiness: change your Shader Basic Parameters to Anisotropic, use the specular maps that came with the ship for the specular maps(obviously) and increase the overall specularity to 350-400, pure white. Increase the glossiness to around 80.
Those are some of the settings I use for the CGSovereign, but you may need to play around with the settings to get it to look right.
I use the Specular maps for the Bump map and for reflections on the hull for some settings. I could go more in depth about what I have set up... however, the more detailed you get with texture settings the longer it takes to render. That image took about 2 minutes to render and that might not seem long, but I did an animation test render at that resolution and it took over 2 hours for a little under 11 seconds of footage @ 24fps.
If you need anymore information, just ask. :D
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change your Shader Basic Parameters to Anisotropic
?.?
woulda know..........
and yes, if you want it to look right, you have to spend lots of times to get a 5-sec segment of video.
that's why I render by segments. background, first plane, effects, extras and stuff, everything independent from each other, so i prevent two things:
1- long render times
2- file crashes
rendering to JPGs for moving footage allows me to use Premiere with greenscreen to mount the animation, and rendering to TGAs is better for the effects. also, if you render to images and then make a movie (.avi, or .mov, or whatever) once it's done, you can recover the last rendered frame in case of a system crash/overload or a cut of light (yep, happened to me once >.<)
how do you get the starfield to look right? i used video post to render a starfield but it didn't show.
I copied it from a tutorial where it said that I had to use a camera effect; the preview looked fine, but the saved image was a complete crap.
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The starfield is tricky. For small preview images, the default amount of stars is fine, but for larger images you need to increase that number. I also recommend that you increase the star pixels to 1.5 and push the dimming down to around 20. Also remember, the bigger your image, the larger the star size should be. The following settings were for a 3840x2160 rendering of that same image.
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Looks like you're doing pretty well. With practice, you'll be pro in no time.
And now a shameless plug for my latest render...
Amazing pic C.Inc, as usual.
Materials on the ship are great and lighting is brilliant, my only complain are the bussards, i think they could use some more fading.
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that (more or less) was what I used.
I'll post the pic I saw in the preview and the pic I saved.
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Amazing pic C.Inc, as usual.
Materials on the ship are great and lighting is brilliant, my only complain are the bussards, i think they could use some more fading.
Eh... The thing with the bussards, is that the glow blocks out all definition of the noise... So, I'm thinking that I'll actually make the material myself out of noise and only have the red glow, instead of having the entire texture map glow... I'll try it and get back...
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Eh... The thing with the bussards, is that the glow blocks out all definition of the noise... So, I'm thinking that I'll actually make the material myself out of noise and only have the red glow, instead of having the entire texture map glow... I'll try it and get back...
I'd go using a Mask on the Opacity slot.
and add the noise on the Mask.
I have the settings on the pic I told you
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Heh, you want to know something funny? I can't get any other material other then CG's bussard texture sequence to map to the bussard 'glass'. When I try to apply a noise, marble, smoke, anything other then a normal image texture to it, it won't map properly. Like the UVW coordinates are not right, so I go and apply a basic uvw map, but it only maps a solid color, no detail.... strange. In the viewport everything looks fine, but to render....
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can I borrow you that scene?
or if you have a way to send me the materials you used?
I have something close to that with an Akira, but it's not the same.
also, starfields still don't work :P
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All the materials are CG's High Resolution Textures for his Sovereign. I ported the model with Milkshape 3D back when the model was first released with a few changes to fix how some polys were not level with the ones around them.
If you don't have the textures, you can get them at BCFiles. They're about 10MB to download and around 250MB uncompressed.
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All the materials are CG's High Resolution Textures for his Sovereign. I ported the model with Milkshape 3D back when the model was first released with a few changes to fix how some polys were not level with the ones around them.
I meant the values on the materials.
I already have a CGSov. the 4th render up there ^^
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Heh, you want to know something funny? I can't get any other material other then CG's bussard texture sequence to map to the bussard 'glass'. When I try to apply a noise, marble, smoke, anything other then a normal image texture to it, it won't map properly. Like the UVW coordinates are not right, so I go and apply a basic uvw map, but it only maps a solid color, no detail.... strange. In the viewport everything looks fine, but to render....
Get rid of one of the levels, you won?t need them in max anyway.
perhaps cg used a channel 2 mapping there.
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Hurray! I finally figured it out, thanks to Legacy's info. It was a very overly complex procedure because it wasn't exactly like you described. However, I can still map the texture animation and have it fit, so I'm happy.
I'll post a screen once I re-render the above image with the improvements.
@Nighthawk. I'll post my material settings with the update.
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Ok, finally some progress.
@Nighthawk: Here are the material settings you asked for. The settings are the same no matter the texture (top, hull, nacell, etc). I used these settings in both 3dsMax7 and 9 so you should have no problems, even with earlier versions, such as 4.
@Legacy: Updated Picture 8)
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Bussards look top now, but the green nebula... hmm.. right now it's too sparse, i think you should add some minor gaseous effect linking the dots (make the noise treshold on it bigger and lower the fractal values, that assuming you're using a noise)
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Eh... I've tried playing with different settings for that nebula, and I don't really want to spend any more time on it. The ship is what's important.
@Nighthawk: I apologize for hijacking your thread.
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@Nighthawk: I apologize for hijacking your thread.
thanks you did.
otherwise, I wouldn't have found that render. I'll try those settings and make a small clip.
let's hope it don't take much time...
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here's the pic I promised. get this while I render the video.........
the aim was to get that Nemesis pic on the corner.
yep, I know I couldn't :P
(http://img258.imageshack.us/img258/6803/nemesisll8.jpg)
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That looks pretty accurate to me!
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Hey, great render! It looks really good. Perhaps a higher resolution image is in order?
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Hey, the render looks pretty good.
Of course it's pretty small, and that cg sov 1.0 has some things that does not look that good in closeups like that empty white windows, but overall it looks pretty good so far.
Time to add some faint glow to that impulse engine.
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Hey, great render! It looks really good. Perhaps a higher resolution image is in order?
the image is 1024x768. I resized the placeholder so anyone can see it here. if you right-click and follow it to imageshack it will load in full size.
the starfield tecnique you told me, doesn't work. I don't get a real starfield that changes when I move the camera, it's just a background pic. it's perfect for pictures or standalone renders, tho. but I can't get flybys or travellings with that.
on the other side, looks like Anisotropic materials are faster to render. I spent near 50 seconds to render the whole image, while the pic with the other Sovereign ^^ took me near 2 minutes with Metal and Phong materials, and I had to do some small touches in Photopaint after that.
Hey, the render looks pretty good.
Of course it's pretty small, and that cg sov 1.0 has some things that does not look that good in closeups like that empty white windows, but overall it looks pretty good so far.
Time to add some faint glow to that impulse engine.
actually, that's not CG's texture. I modded it a little so it glows white instead of blue, but the glows in the blue texture were white, so white on white doesn't work :P
the hull, however, is still as it was. so the little windows still glow blue.
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That is an awesome render, kudos to you nighthawk
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The reason you're not getting a moving background is because you need to be looking through a camera. That, and you need to set the Starfield up to use the camera.
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The reason you're not getting a moving background is because you need to be looking through a camera. That, and you need to set the Starfield up to use the camera.
believe it or not, I was.
I used a camera to render two different frames spaced 5 frames so the motion was evident. and the background was still freezed.
I temporally fixed it: a BIG sphere with stars.tga in 2-sided map. I know, bad work there..... :P
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Well, that certainly is strange. Usually, when you're rendering through a camera, the starfield will animate...
Edit: Here's a video test render. I was testing my material setup; checking the reflections,glows and specularity. I'm using RapidShare because this board wouldn't let me upload a 2.5mb zip file. And since I'm going this route, you get it at full quality.
http://rapidshare.com/files/33773084/MatTest.avi
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I'll take a look at that vid once I get home. Rapidshare is disabled in this PC :(
have a look at the first version of the vid I'm making. this is supposed to be secret, but it's outdated anyways. this, if I remember correctly, was done on Adobe Premiere, so the whole video is a collage of different videos. Actually, the same sequence with new models, lighting and a new starfield is on the go.
http://files.filefront.com/intro1_view01mov/;7190179;/fileinfo.html
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another scene of the same video. this is on GMax, which I used to set the animation that I'll copy on 3DS.
the phasers are supposed to disappear, but GMax is not that good handling transparency, so those orange lines that you see stucked there, are actually not there. same with the "shockwave" sphere.
.bik player required.
http://files.filefront.com/scene6bik/;7650646;/fileinfo.html
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Interesting stuff. I hate to say it, but GMax is seriously lacking...
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Interesting stuff. I hate to say it, but GMax is seriously lacking...
yep, but even so, I find it easier to handle than 3ds when it comes to just animate something, specially models like those.
for bridge scenes I'm forced to use 3ds, tho biped animation is something I'm still getting used on.