Fretslayer
November 16th, 2008, 08:27 AM
I converted this outstanding ship into Carrara format last night and so I threw this little animation together to test things like specular mapping and ...well... Just to see her fly.
I did a couple of things with it - Like I took the inner and outer bussard domes and counter rotated them as the ship moved.
Also, Carrara Pro 6 has an awesome feature called 'Anything Glows' which turns any object into a light source. I used that to throw a blue light from the nacells and the bussards are 'light mapped' with the texture from the outer dome. When the domes spin so do the light maps.
I also did one other thing (I hope you don't mind EG) and that was a slight texture modification to the windows. I have a 'room' that I texture map to the windows and add a self-illumination property to. This way as the ship moves by the windows appear to have little rooms on the other side.
Anyway - I had fun with this and as promised before here are some specs.
Conversion time: 5 hours. I first opened it up in Deep Exploration to make sure the maps would all come with. Saved it, opened it in Carrara and then added the specular and bump maps. All of the maps went easily except for the engine pylons but they always give me a hard time. Also, I may have missed a texture or two because I was getting were I just wanted to animate it and watch her fly.
Animation Time: 10 hours @ 30fps - 10secs (or 300 frames).
The render time was much longer than I expected but it was due largely to my 'mapping a light'. That really slows things down. My average time per frame was about 1:30 due do this.
Over all it's not bad but I really don't like the way the camera spun as the ship passed - it's too fast - but other than that I think it's pretty cool.
EG - your ship (IMO) looks fantastic and I had a blast bringing it to life and watching it move. Thanks for sharing it. I'm already writing a story that will use both it and MKF's reImagined ship as soon as they make it public (in December - Thanks Taranis!).
If you get bored EG - how about a reImagined Klingon ship? Could be cool and would no doubt work perfectly into a short film with the other reImagined ships - hint- hint- hint- :laugh:
This file is an AVI (divX 5 codec) and it's about 4mb.
http://wabashponies.com/dan/EG180-TEST-A.avi
I have a couple of more scenes planned to animate with it.
A bit of a duel between this ship and a Romulan one.
When it's done it should be about 4-5 minutes long and hopefully be fun to watch.
I did a couple of things with it - Like I took the inner and outer bussard domes and counter rotated them as the ship moved.
Also, Carrara Pro 6 has an awesome feature called 'Anything Glows' which turns any object into a light source. I used that to throw a blue light from the nacells and the bussards are 'light mapped' with the texture from the outer dome. When the domes spin so do the light maps.
I also did one other thing (I hope you don't mind EG) and that was a slight texture modification to the windows. I have a 'room' that I texture map to the windows and add a self-illumination property to. This way as the ship moves by the windows appear to have little rooms on the other side.
Anyway - I had fun with this and as promised before here are some specs.
Conversion time: 5 hours. I first opened it up in Deep Exploration to make sure the maps would all come with. Saved it, opened it in Carrara and then added the specular and bump maps. All of the maps went easily except for the engine pylons but they always give me a hard time. Also, I may have missed a texture or two because I was getting were I just wanted to animate it and watch her fly.
Animation Time: 10 hours @ 30fps - 10secs (or 300 frames).
The render time was much longer than I expected but it was due largely to my 'mapping a light'. That really slows things down. My average time per frame was about 1:30 due do this.
Over all it's not bad but I really don't like the way the camera spun as the ship passed - it's too fast - but other than that I think it's pretty cool.
EG - your ship (IMO) looks fantastic and I had a blast bringing it to life and watching it move. Thanks for sharing it. I'm already writing a story that will use both it and MKF's reImagined ship as soon as they make it public (in December - Thanks Taranis!).
If you get bored EG - how about a reImagined Klingon ship? Could be cool and would no doubt work perfectly into a short film with the other reImagined ships - hint- hint- hint- :laugh:
This file is an AVI (divX 5 codec) and it's about 4mb.
http://wabashponies.com/dan/EG180-TEST-A.avi
I have a couple of more scenes planned to animate with it.
A bit of a duel between this ship and a Romulan one.
When it's done it should be about 4-5 minutes long and hopefully be fun to watch.