[Styxx]

Originally posted by Kazan
styxx: did you have a program that you could give geometry data to and have it generate the asteroid belt - or did you have to do it manually

I used both particle systems and the Scatter plugin for MAX - you give it a volume and an array of objects and it'll scatter the objects randomly throughout the volume. The particle system is for the far away objects, the scatter is for those closer to the camera, and I positioned some manually that are very close to the eye point.

[Raven2001]

[Nico]

Originally posted by Kazan
styxx: did you have a program that you could give geometry data to and have it generate the asteroid belt - or did you have to do it manually

You know, something like that in max isn't that difficult to make
the real problem is: "Will my PC be able to handle all that?"
The answer to this, if you do it the hard way, is generally:"No, damnit!!!!". That's when you show skills, like Styxx, obviously, to simplify the whole thing w/o ruining the visuals.
Dunno how Styxx did, but I believe I'd use particles, with a planar particle, with random asteroid pics applied to them ( with an alpha chanel of course, don't want a black square around the roids ), and all those particles aligned to the camera normals. I wouldn't even bother with high poly asteroids, in fact, unless there's one coming REAL close to the camera ( if the camera moves slowly ), with motion blur, you won't see the difference anyway.
If you want them to rotate, replace the pic with an avi, et voila ( yes, you can use avi as maps ).

[Kazan]

Nico: i don't use Max or LW (or even have them)

[Styxx]

Originally posted by Kazan
Nico: i don't use Max or LW (or even have them)

If you want to get that effect on an engine, it's quite simple too, just make the usual LODs for the asteroids, but set the lowest LOD to a sprite that replaces the whole model. Of course you won't ever be able to handle that many asteroids in one scene in real time with current hardware - there are hundreds of thousands of asteroids there - but you'll get a nice approximation on the local scene.

Getting a smooth disk effect on an engine would be harder, though, as you'd have to slowly fade them into a textured tube (multiple tubes, if you want it to look good) with the distance. It's doable, but in any normal engine it would be a very special case... Unless you broke up the "disk" into many small sections (which would still be a LOT less poly intensive than the asteroids) and had the higher LODs almost transparent, gaining opacity as it decreased, so the fading effect would be built automatically for you.

Erm, no idea if this is what you were thinking about...

[Kazan]

i was talking about doing it in Truespace

[Styxx]

Ah. Ops. No idea.

[Zuljin]

yet again two thumbs up for Styxx  
those pics looks just awesome

...I want that campaign!!!!
*goes around the room getting shaky while muttering*
need....machina...terra....

ok, but seriously....I just can't wait until it's done

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Originally posted by Setekh


Mwahahah, MT has you now!

Too bad no one has MT at the moment (and no, the creators are not included in this asssssessssssment (so what, I didn't know how many 's' were needed )

[Bobboau]

to do that in TS you would need to place each of the 150,000 asteriods by hand, particles is the thing that TS doesn't even try to do, the very concept of a particle system is alien to it