JoelS

Creating a simple tutorial on using 3rd party texture tools isn't a bad idea, really. Is that something that would be desirable to include on the CD (along with the original scene, of course)? @ entity: Wouldn't Yves's materials create basically the same problem, though, in that they would require that extra step of having the user get the .atx or .trb files and place them in the correct folders? It's admittedly not too daunting a task, but adds another layer between 'load project' and 'click render'. His CellFX turbulence could be useful in recreating some of the detail the darktree provides, though I remember in the past that it was kind of slow to render. But there would seem to be little difference between having people install the Simbiont or having them install new .trb files (aside from the Simbiont being slightly more complex to get in and running), at least in terms of what seems to be wanted for the content CD.

Some of you may remember the image I did for the April image contest, which you can see here: http://www.hash.com/stills/displayimage.php?album=30&pos=41 I was asked if I would donate this scene for inclusion on the AM CD, and I agreed to do so. However, the CD is intended for new users to be able to load up the scene, click 'render' and have the nifty scene produce a cool result. My scene there relies on Darktrees for about 90% of the texturing, and since the Simbiont is a 3rd party utility (and a little confusing to get running for someone who's never even used AM), I agreed to do a remake of the scene using only textures/materials that can run in vanilla, out-of-the-box AM. This leaves me with a dilemma which I will pose to you all. How should I retexture the scene to make it as helpful and cool as possible while sticking to only AM-native tools? There is no suitable proceedural plugin in the native AM toolbox to reproduce the borg-ish building texture that I used, at least not that I know of. My initial thought was to recreate much of the lost detail through adding in a boatload of geometry. You can see the initial results of that approach on one of the middle buildings (the one that doesn't look like a plain box) on the render below. Clearly this will also require additional texturing to look cool. This kind of scene really begs for proceedurals, but I could texture all the little buildings by hand with decals. I kind of want to avoid this, as it seems like it'd be a whole lot of work. But if thats the best way to do it, I will. I was able to create a reasonable facimile of the moon texture with native AM combiners, at least. Any thoughts or ideas on what you, as someone who conceivably would be loading up this scene to render it, would like to see?

Cool interpretation about whats going on in the scene : ) I like that it is open to people's imaginations to provide some story or context to the events that are transpiring there. As for the 'camera fog image', perhaps I can clarify. If you look at the Render To File options panel, you will see a 'FOG' setting. This can be adjusted to various lengths, and fades the scene out into the camera's background color. They also provide the option to use an image as the 'fog', though (fading the models in the scene into the image itself). I had rarely considered using this feature until I thought to try it for this particular shot. Originally, the background from this shot was just to be a nebula-styled starscape. This seemed kind of dull to me, though, and the cloudy nebula art I had done looked like it was coming from the city itself, so I considered how I might make it look as if the clouds were emanating from the city. I then tried the fog option, and liked how it looked. At that point, I added the stronger 'energy discharge' bolts to the background nebula art. I aligned them so they appeared to be coming from the one building, as if to give the clouds some epicenter.

Thanks for all the comments! I'm glad people enjoyed this image. To address a few of them... @ Mike & Paul - the moon probably does show a bit too much detail. It is a bit bumpier than I'd like it, though I can probably fix that by tweaking the darktree if I go back to the image. If you have darktree or the simbiont, it's using the basic 'planet' darktree they give, with the landmass and ocean colors switched to various greys. The landmass bits have a mountainous texture, I think, which bumps it up a bit more than it probably should be for this particular moon. @ Mike again - You're also likely right about the specularity levels, though I am no expert on surfacing things realistically. That and lighting are the two areas that I would want to improve if realism were my main focus in 3d modelling. I tend to like working on anime styled projects more, as it doesn't require the same fanatical dedication to making sure everything is just as it is in the real world. I greatly admire the skills that it takes to produce photorealistic 3d surfacing... in general I just don't like to take the time to do it myself : ) For those interested, here is a wireframe, overlaid on the image itself, which shows just how much of the structural details on the small buildings is trickery! It's all smoke & mirrors... EDIT: oh hey... I do have a second light in this shot. Hmmh. It doesn't do much though, just casts a bit of green up onto the underside of the foreground ship to set off the underside of it a bit better.

A number of people left me very nice comments on the AMStills gallery, so I thought a few of you may enjoy seeing a slightly re-worked hi-res version of the pic I entered in the March sci-fi contest. (the hi-res version is attached at the bottom of this post) A few comments on its making: The whole thing is really based on a lot of trickery and forced perspective, when it comes down to it. Luckily you can get away with that in stills most of the time! Breaking it down into parts: The lower city - nearly all of the small buildings are simply boxes with beveled tops. For the hi-res version, I went back in and added in some additional geometry to a few of them, but the effect is really minor due to the texturing. To lay out the city, I made an Adboe Illustrator file of boxes to represent the top-down view of a chunk of city. Importing it into AM was easy with the AI wizard, and I used the wizard to bevel the tops. I then grabbed various buildings and altered the height of their tops to break up the even-ness. The texture was achieved with two materials. The first is a darktree proceedural that supplies most of the detail. I felt that the flat, plain colors that the darktree supplied lacked the final touch of 'realism' I wanted, so I made a projection map using a gritty steel plate texture I have, set it to 'diffuse' and let it add some grime and darkness variation to the darktree. To create the depth of the shot, I grabbed my city block and laid down several of them next to each other, rotating them at 90deg. angles to randomize the building layout. The big buildings - The buildings on either side of the picture are actually spaceships... or they were. I took two of the ships from my July'04 image contest entry (which you can see here) and stood them on end. I shifted some of their elements around and rejiggered this and that, then applied the same texture from the small buildings to them. The ships - These really aren't that complex of models. Since I knew they would only be seen from behind, I concentrated most of the detail in the engine block area. The engine effect (which for some reason didn't look nearly as good in the jpg posted for the contest entry) comes mainly from volumetric dust spheres inside the engine exhausts. The foreground ship is scaled much larger than the other two, falsely giving the impression of distance and depth between them. The background - probably my best trick in the whole thing, really. The green energy vortex/clouds are a camera fog image, blending the cityscape into them and giving the impression that something really bad just melted down and is engulfing the buildings. Additionally, there is a volumetric dust box projecting a green dust upwards from beneath the entire city area, which sort of blends the atmosphere from the background into the scene even more. The moon is a modelled sphere, and was textured with a combo darktree/hash 'dented' texture. There's only one light in the whole thing, a sun coming from behind the camera to the left. The generally dark textures definitely were essential in maintaining the illusion of detail and complexity in the scene overall. At 5 pass multipass rendering, the scene only took 20min to render, which I was surprised at given the extensive use of proceedurals (especially darktrees, which used to be quite slow). That was probably more than anyone wanted to know, but perhaps there were some curious enough to read it all!