[Nico]

and reupload the pic coz it won't load at 100%  

[Setekh]

Whoa, that's really nice. I don't have much more to say, and besides, I'll be judging, so I'll let you keep improving it  

[Fineus]

Looks very impressive (definite improvement in the second image). And like Setekh said - can't give out to much advice  

[KillMeNow]

semi final one now - i'm fed up of trying to get that water to look nicer - i need a tutorial if anyone knows where there is on for lightwave point me in that direction and i will go have a look and maybe improve ti abit more

 

[Fineus]

Looks very impressive! Good job dude  

[deadguy]

Ok, here's my tidbit - it's dawn right? Well, the lighting is lacking in one important area. It's dawn. Go outside at dawn and look at how the light fills the shadows - you're getting light from all directions, because the sky itself is re-radiating it - otherwise you'd see a black sky. I'd suggest, for this render, that you turn your ambient light intensity up - under your Global Illumination button - about 15% with a light blue color. Your alternatives are to use a couple of fill lights to pull up the shadow areas, or go the insane route.

The insane route involves the "render warp images" in skytracer, and then using Texture Environment as your environment instead - since it gives you control of your image, you can turn up the luminosity then render with radiosity on. As I said, that's the insane route (the one I take every day :wink: ).

It's looking good so far, I might composite those moons with absolutely no shadow at all, just make them arcs of light - you never see any shadow on our moon in the daytime...


[This message has been edited by deadguy (edited 12-19-2001).]

[deadguy]

I have a rudimentary .SRF file that might do what you're looking for as far as water is concerned. Tweak it to your heart's desire. Shift-click here to get it.

Here's what it looks like - there's one light in the scene, a 10kmx10km square for the ocean, and a simple bitmap as a Texture Environment.
   

[KillMeNow]

hmm your ocean is beautiful - but i disagree with the lighting - at dawn and dusk things can be siloteed against a sky but the sky on the other horizon still dark so you get lots of shadows - at first i did a radiosity render adn it looked flat and lifeless so i tutned it off and reduced the rendering time from aboput 10 hours to 10 mins and got a nicer result -  but back to the ocean how did you do that and what is this srf file? i never incounted them before

[Setekh]

I'd just have done it in Terragen and post-processed the ships into it.  

[deadguy]

Ok, I built a 10km square box, with a 0m height, and loaded it into layout. At first it looked really small, but layout always resizes the grid - the display panel had the grid at 5km, a switch to 1m made it look like a horizon. I made a surface with textures on the color, reflection and bump channels. You can see the settings when you load it. There's a fractal noise procedural on the color - to add a tint of green randomly. There's an incidence angle gradient on the reflection - ( you could also use a light incidence on it). Lastly, there's three procedural texture layers on the bump: coriolis, fractal noise and crumple. two are additive, and one is multiplicative.

That .srf file is a lightwave surface file - just open lightwave's surface editor, and hit load, then apply it to your ocean object. Like I said, the values are 10m at the largest, so if your models are small, you may have to alter the surface values. A 1m Falcon against a 10m wave will look silly.

BTW, if you're using Skytracer for your backdrop, that's why it looked lifeless - skytracer isn't included in radiosity calculations. A bright skytracer backdrop won't change the lighting for the scene. That's why you'd have to "render warp images", to create a texture that can be luminous.

[This message has been edited by deadguy (edited 12-20-2001).]

[KillMeNow]

hmmmmmmm i just assumed radiosity used all sources of light - and since the skytacer is or seems to be rendered in properly not post process - i assumed it woul d taken into accont - but anyway i will try your method - i assume it turns the sky tracer intoa an object and apply a texture to them which can be radiosity rendered

anyway since i have a professional by the looks of things here want to give me some advice how i can make it look like the water is being dstrubed by teh falcons thrust?

[deadguy]

Professional? hahaha!!! Far from it my friend.

You know, that .srf file may actually look like crap if the light isn't sitting on it - I never actually checked other angles. That's the problem of knowing what you're looking for - you tend not to look anywhere else.

As far as disturbance, what are you looking for - a trail of water spewing up? Like those pictures when a jet is skimming the wavetops?

hmm... the fastest, and probably the most sensible way would be to take make a vertical plane with several segments, and to bend it. Create your water trail in a paint program with an alpha. You may have to fiddle with the alpha or duplicate it and save only an alpha to get it right. If I figure it out soon, I'll try and let you know.

The other way is to grow them with particle systems, which I don't know much about at the moment.