Eric2575

Hey Cuboos: I watched all three videos - pretty cool what you are doing. Keep it up and one day I'll be able to say that I often chat with that new director that just made the latest blockbuster film. Young Spielberg in the making!! Cheers Eric

First of all, your sand image has to be seamlessly tileable. If it is, you can apply it as a decal to your ground model. Zoom out in the modeling window until you can see the whole ground model. Once there, import the image as a decal - you can drag it into the modeling window - and select "decal". Make sure the decal overlaps the ground model on all sides by a little bit. Now go to the decal folder in the model and set the decal repeat (x,y) to the value you want - depends on the scale of the ground and resolution of the image. That should do the trick.

Hi AL: What Mike said - the black spots when using porcelain are usually due to Normals facing the wrong way. Hit the button to show normals - I think you can do it by hitting shift/1 - then select the patch that has the inverted normal and hit "f". Usually you'll have several patches next to each other that will need to be fixed. Really great job so far. Eric

My suggestion is to look at the "Giraffe" tutorial in the AM workbook and pretty much copy the general layout of the body and legs from there (heavily modified off course).

You can apply a decal to the ground or apply a grass material to it. Start with a decal, since working with grass is a bit more advanced.

Al: Really nice going. You really don't need porcelain since your mesh is already so smooth, but try it just for fun anyways. One of the places you can find it is on the "Extras" cd. Probably the easiest way to find it is to do a search of your computer for the porcelain material. Once you import the material, group all your car skin and apply the porcelain to that group, then render. When you go back to working on your model, remove the porcelain to see the skin in it's natural state. You can always reapply it once you are finished with your model.

Al: are you using porcelan on your model? Would you post a wireframe? Thanks.

Ok now, you can talk up a storm about how you did it, but a wireframe is worth a thousand words.

I haven't seen the designs for the new movie. Do you have a link? The lights on the saucer are produced by a simple high resolution ambiance decal. See an example of such a decal in the second post of this thread: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...=ambiance+decal If you want specific details, send me a private message - or if more people are interested, then I may post a tutorial here.

Thank you Mark. Nice job on your project, I've been following it along with everyone else. Can't wait for some animation from you. I've been working on the main body and have actually redone it twice due to spline layout and such, but am still not happy with it. I'm also not sold on the radar dish up front. I may divert from the Koerner design and improvise a bit. Anyways, here is a test of the engines.

Super!

Beautiful, nicely done!

Al: that's looking really good so far. In my limited experience, there is no way you can avoid 5 pointers around the wheel wells - Xtaz has tons of experience and may know different. Don't let 5'ers discourage you though - with bias tweaking and looking at the mesh from all sorts of different directions, you can get them to lay down very smooth. Couple of pointers - keep the 5's as small and flat as possible, one of the main reasons they tweak is because the 5th vertex throws off the balance of the other four balanced points. If you can keep all 5 in a relatively smooth flow, it'll work out fine.

Thanks Ken Been working on the aft part of the main hull and it's giving me a bit of a fit. No worries, just about got it licked. For an interlude, I started working on the decals of the ship. So far, I'm very pleased with the results. Don't mind the unfinished parts of the model, I'll get to them tomorrow. Me thinks it's shaping up nicely.

Just for fun.

Sure thing, here ya go.

Yes, that's the design I saw, but your link has pics I've never seen before. What a treasure of references. This will make the modeling a bit easier, thanks. Also a big thanks to Gabe for the inspiration.

Getting the big stuff done.

Thanks T-Dogg, I'm gonna put a lot of detail into this one.

A little update.

I saw a redesigned 1701 on the web created by a very talented Star Trek fan and wanted to recreate it in Animation Master. I'll have to find the original web site in order to credit the author, but for now I'm just gonna post my progress. I know it's been done upteen times, but I'm a space junkie and always wanted to try my hand at the old girl. Enjoy.

Try placing the volumetric light just slightly ahead of the geometry.

Usually entrants into the monthly contests do not show their work before the vote for several reasons. One good reason is the element of surprise. It's always fun to find out at the end who did what, and not knowing beforehand. Another reason is that you are showing your hand (as in a game of poker) - now others who are entering know what they are up against in order to try and beat your entry. Anyways, it's your call. What are the small rectangular shapes in the background, spacecraft wrecks? All in all, nice work.

Very cool effect. How long does that take to render?

Sorry I didn't get back to you earlier, I was in the Mohave desert over the weekend. There was actually snow in the Tehachapi mountains. The snow on the roof and ground effect was achieved in two similar yet different ways. For the roof, I modeled the basic shape and then created a tilable jpeg of snow that I used to make a bitmap plus material. The jpeg below is what I used. You may use it if you like. The attached image was the large version. You might want to reduce it in size. The snow on the ground was a bit trickier. Since I wanted the path to look like the snow had recently been shoveled, I thought I'd use a displacement map for that and then the bitmap for the flat areas. The problem was that the displacement decal and the bitmap did not like each other and came out all messed up. So, I rendered the ground with a different tileable snow pattern decal set to color. This gave me the main snow field which I could then use as a displacement decal. Now I had to incorporate the path displacement. So I opened up photoshop and created the path exactly where I needed it to be for the scene. Once I had the path in the snow field, keeping in mind that it had to be created with shades of black and white in order for the displacement to do it's work, I came up with the displacement map below. You may also use it in any way to suit your needs. Hope that helps. Can't wait to see what you are going to come up with. Btw, thanks for the kind words about my Christmas pic. Cheers Eric