Serenity 3D mesh available for download!
POSTED BY: Treybor
UPDATED: Sunday, February 10, 2013 01:51
VIEWED: 52893
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Quote:
Originally posted by Lindley:
Resolution would be fairly low, so that's not really an issue.
The thing is, I'm trying to make an EVN sprite which includes engine glows. I'm using a trick of the engine to make a seperate glow for "Hyperspace" than for "normal maneuvers".
The main issue will probably be that, in theory, glows are supposed to be rendered seperately from the ship, but in the proper location. However, the ship should still be able to eclipse them when necessary, so simply disabling rendering of the ship itself isn't an option.
Is there an easy way to make the entire ship, save the glows, render as matte black? I know how to do that by adjusting the textures, but there are a *lot* of textures in the model, so I don't want to do that to all of them if there's a faster way.
I'm sure there is-- though I've never used that render setting. let me check when I get home....
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Well, in the meantime, here's some caps of the sublight and full burn glows that I came up with. The lameness of my full burn glow is the main reason we're having this conversation, but I'm more or less happy with how the sublight glows came out.
If you do the render for me, I'd appriciate it if you could do all of it, including similar sublight glows-----more accurate that way. My glows are just really short cylinders with one end stretched out, a fog texture, and direct from-the-camera lighting. But you can do them however works best in Lightwave.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Lindley:
Well, in the meantime, here's some caps of the sublight and full burn glows that I came up with. The lameness of my full burn glow is the main reason we're having this conversation, but I'm more or less happy with how the sublight glows came out.
If you do the render for me, I'd appriciate it if you could do all of it, including similar sublight glows-----more accurate that way. My glows are just really short cylinders with one end stretched out, a fog texture, and direct from-the-camera lighting. But you can do them however works best in Lightwave.
OK.... I don't play escape velocity, so I need to know a few things:
1. What Point of View the animation should be from?
2. How big is a typical sprite? 100 x 100 pixels? 500 x 500 pixels? Larger?
3. Does the animation need to have a transparent background?
4. How soon do you need this? I'm travelling to Japan next week and will be away from my rendering system.
5. If I could provide PICT files or a Quicktime movie, could you create a sprite out of that?
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1. What Point of View the animation should be from?
To start, the ship should be facing away from the camera, with the camera positioned 45 degrees up from it, looking straight down at the ship.
Perspective should be eliminated as much as possible; positioning the camera very far away and using a high zoom factor is one way to do that, or there might be an option to turn it off directly.
Let's say the ship is facing in the -x direction. A camera position of x = 10000, y = 10000, x-zoom = 190 would be a possibility.
Two light sources need to be included. The primary should be positioned 45 degrees to the left of front of the ship, and 30 degrees above it. Using the same "ship faces -x" assumption, x = -5000, y = 3535.5, z = -5000 would be one possibility. The y value is -x / root 2.
The secondary light should be positioned above the ship; its main purpose is to make sure the entire ship is visible, without overpowering the primary light. y = 1500 might be appropriate.
Both lights should be white, and the glow from neither should intrude into the render area---they are present solely for the effect they have on the ship. Make sure its fully visible, perhaps even go overboard just a tad, but don't make it unnaturally bright.
The animation should show the ship spinning around its center (directly between the two side engines), in a clockwise direction. It should consist of 36 frames for every "state" of the ship----one every 10 degrees. This can be easily done by setting keyframes every 90 degrees.
So, frame 0 = ship facing "up", frame 9 = ship facing right, frame 18 = ship facing "down", frame 27 = ship facing left, frame 35 = ship facing 10 degrees left of up (350 degrees to the right).
The underside of the ship is never seen, unfortunately.
Further details depend on exactly how the transition from normal flight to full burn works on your model. EVN's engine supports an "Unfold to hyper" feature; how many frames do you think unfolding should take? For every frame of the unfolding process, another 36 frames like above would be required with the ship in that state.
All of the above applies to the ship *without engine glows*. Each of the above sets of 36 frames has a corresponding set of 36 frames where only the engine glow is visible, but the ship itself is not (matte black). For rendering those, I recommend disabling the lights; engine glows seem to looks best when lit from the perspective of the camera. Obviously, one set of engine glow frames would show only the sublight glows, and one set would show only the full burn glow; but exactly what gets shown in the intermediate steps is up to you. If you can accurately capture the manner in which Serenity's full burn "pulses", that'd be great, but I'm not looking for miracles. Its worth noting that the best way to do that might be to incorperate the "light build-up" into the base sprite of the ship, rather than the engine glow sprite.
Quote:
2. How big is a typical sprite? 100 x 100 pixels? 500 x 500 pixels? Larger?
Rendering at 320x240 or thereabouts is fine. (It doesn't have to be square---just so long as the entire ship is visible, no matter which direction its pointing in the current frame.) The final sprite will be smaller, but rendering oversize improves the final result.
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3. Does the animation need to have a transparent background?
No, the background should be black. However, I'll also need masks for each and every frame (pure black, but with a pure-white shape where the ship is), so make sure you enable "render seperate alpha channel", or whatever Lightwave calls it.
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4. How soon do you need this? I'm travelling to Japan next week and will be away from my rendering system.
Its not urgent. I've been waiting months for someone to complete a model of the Firefly-class, so I can wait a bit longer. I'd appriciate if it didn't take *too* long, though.
Quote:
5. If I could provide PICT files or a Quicktime movie, could you create a sprite out of that?
A quickt
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Please e-amil what images you have of your own ship. sean.kennedy@am.sony.com I have a 5 MB limit for attachments.
OK --- Let me get this straight you need the following:
1. a 36 frame rotation without flame
2. a 36 frame rotation without flame - alpha
3. a 36 frame rotation of the wing engine flame
4. a 36 frame rotation with the shudders opening
5. a 36 frame rotation with the shudders opening -alpha
6. a 36 frame rotation with the shudders open and engine glow full.
7. a 36 frame rotation with the shudders open and engine glow full - alpha
8. a 36 frame rotation with firefly burst
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^Almost. The glows will require alpha masks also.
And, although this is not required, it occurs to me that it might look better if the "burst" occurs in the second-to-last frame of the unfolding process as part of the base image; and the last frame is has no glow on the base image, but leaves it to the glow image.
That's because the hyper engine glow persists during the entire run-up to jump, and I don't want the brightest part of the flash to persist that entire time.
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OK. I'll see what I can do.
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Just got back from Japan. I'll try and work on it this weekend.
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Much appriciated.
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