queen o' the night (minnow 3 of 4)

[meshula]

http://www.startrek-forums.com/gladiators/ubb/html/uploads/minnow3of4.jpg

If no-one spots anything I need to fix here, I'll go ahead and render it large. Notice as part of the retexturing I added self illumination? Dig the fancy interior! You can see the ceilings in the main saucer! Also, this shows my new nacelles (like in the tutorial) in action.

Maybe I'll add one more key to give the bottom of the engineering hull a little definition...

-n


[This message has been edited by meshula (edited 10-22-2000).]

[Thomas P]

No nit-pic here, looks great. I want to see the larger version!

[skyhawk223]

Nice interior man! How many polys is the ship total?

Actually, one question. Should there be some reflection or coloration of the bussard on the hull?

[This message has been edited by skyhawk223 (edited 10-23-2000).]

[Masao]

Since my desk is next to a window and light spills on my screen, I don't see contrasts so well. But maybe you can use a little more in the background, like the milky way or a slight nebular haze, to give a bit more definition to the ship outlines. Nothing too bright or too colorful, though. You do seem to be using a bit of a rimlight already.

[Darrell Lawrence]

I agree. Something very faint in the background is needed.

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[meshula]

It's supposed to represent the cold empty loneliness of deep space. I'll add some ghostly wisps of interstellar dust http://www.startrek-forums.com/gladiators/ubb/html/smilies/smile.gif

As to how many polygons - none! It's modeled with 4700 bezier patches. When exported as polygons it has 243,000 polygons. I assume this is somewhat high.

[skyhawk223]

That's pretty close to what I have as far as polys are concerned.

What app are you using? (Maybe I am just getting old...)

[meshula]

Animation Master from www.hash.com (http://www.hash.com) ($299 all up, no extra plugs to buy)

[meshula]

Actually yes! I just tested it for the first time last night which is how I found out Minnow is worth 240,000 polygons!
The new exporter preserves uv mappings as well, so what was it I was going to export in the first place??? Oh yeah, Masao's Romulans! At last!

[Masao]

Hey, I notice that A:M also works on the Mac. With the Educational discount its only $199. That's what a good lunch costs here in Tokyo. Maybe I should....

[meshula]

I started out with AM on a Mac, a 603PPC with 32MB of RAM. The 3D robots on my site were built on a Mac, as was the first version of my Enterprise. Where I ran into trouble was I didn't have enough RAM to texture the ships. My current G4 Mac has 256MB of RAM, and it can deal with my Enterprise model. So the moral is to make sure you have enough RAM if you go this way.

One nice thing about going from a vector based drawing program to AM is that since AM is spline based it is much easier for a Illustrator/Freehand person to go to AM than to go to a more traditional polygon based program like Lightwave or Max. Working with splines "in the round" is a little odd at first, especially manipulating the spline handles since the handles have a new dimension (z) to go into, and another concept of "twist" that you don't have to worry about in 2d.

[Darrell Lawrence]

Speaking of plug-ins, I know you mentioned a while back you were getting a 3ds exporter plug-in that'd retain the groups.

You get it?

------------------
SF-A Senate Member (http://www.scifi-art.com)
Forum Administrator (http://sfa.c3s.co.uk/ubb/Ultimate.cgi)
3D Gladiators Project Admin

"If not for TOS, then there would be no Trek movies, TNG, DS9 or Voyager."

"All I ask is that you read and understand before jumping to conclusions."

"Legends never die... They just get new Captains."

Warrior of 3D Art (http://warrior.3dworlds.org/)
Poser Space Cadets (http://www.3dposer.com/)