silentrage

lol, man i happen to know EXACTLY why the yf19 kit won't work. i challenged a friend of mine last year to a YF19 modelling contest, he used the kid instructions, i used the design work references. Turns out that his model looked more like a transformer, i mean that thing is SO far from the actual model it's not even funny. and i've never seen the YF19 transformation sequence in detail, I assume there's a page of that somewhere on the macross design works? can someone hook that up? and the yf21 too if you got it, i just wanna see how impossible they seem btw i've never done this but i think animating scaling while transforming is just suicide... it's too many things to keep track of. unless you position your cameras very "strategically." argh, those macross game links are fxxored. but DAMN! You have any idea how hyped I am about this game from reading the descriptions? SEGA is making it!!! frakking RIGHTS!! If I can put my trust in ANYONE to make the right macross game, it'd be sega. let's hope it plays as good as it looks.

hey i was thinking, if you wanna model a transformable valk, then you'd have to model certain parts separately right? wouldn't it be problematic to try and get the aerodynamic streamline of the jet when piecing them together?

yeah you can just triangulize it, polygon rebuild, then clean up some messes... i think MOST people would build things with quads to start with. i know that there's a SDF mod for Homeworld, and it looked fcking nice i don't know if there's anything besides the SDF1 in it but it's good enough for me. also Freespace 2 source is public domain now, so that would be an Excellent engine to use if we can find some good programmers. I played a Macross mod for Freespace 2 before it went open source and it was amazing. When you unleash 32 hornet missiles on a target and they explode in a brilliant trail of firey destruction right behind your fleeing prey, it's just too beautiful.

that might make a good xbox game model why can't anyone make a good macross game?

cool. i'm gonna get hacking with this as soon as i get my RAT package. how long do you think it'll take for a beginner-intermediate 3d artist to get familiar enough with PRman to produce ok animations? i only have about 1 year of experience and that's only with maya.

friendly competition is what drives cooperation. otherwise it'd be more leading and following, not so much cooperating.

i think it must be entirely different now, interface-wise at least, it's descriped as kind of a integrated renderer and can act like a plugin to maya now, so you don't NEED to do any PR specific programming to render with it (to an extend). what is RAT? @_@

ooo, competition for Doc Gonzo.

hmm. Which version did you use? From pixar's product information page i read that you can render maya scenes with PR directly using the Artist's Tools. So i thought you don't need to overhaul your textures... but it's ok i plan on starting something fresh anyways. what are your thoughts on PRman? I thought it would have to be the pinnacle of rendering technology if every major studio's been using it for the past 10 years. :\

i thought i'd just get Renderman and see if i can apply the scripting to my own stuff. there is a PR > maya render pipeline, i think it's called Pixar Artist's Tools i just don't know how long it'll take me to figure out PR scripts. X_X

Fake GI using one light, if i can get this to work right then it'll make rendering everything 10x faster.

actually not to ignore it, but more like setting an un-uniform ambience on your object so that no part of it is black. You'll need to render multiple passes using this method, ambience pass, diffuse pass, FX/other. it simulates a FinalGather effect where your object is lit according to the environment but it's not true GI raytrace so it's much faster.

Has anyone heard of this rendering trick called Ambience Occlusion? If so i would really like to learn a thing or two about it from you guys.

omg i LOVE you guys. thanks for the F14 blueprint! Can someone post a VF0 blue print as well? i'm kindda itching to model it and try to animate it

i'd say the best way to put them on is bump or displacement mapping AND texturing the wear and dirt around them. i don't have any reference handy but i can tell you the best reference is photos of planes. the common ones are oil or fuel streaks on and under the wings. Dirt and oil streaks under screws or bolts and the scratches on them. If a plane has to go as fast as the valkyries it's bound to get all kinds of streaks. If i remember correctly the YF19's top speed with a fast pack is around mach 40. (what the hell do they build these with, gundanium? ) there's usually dirt trails behind the windshield as well, from the dirt and rain water that accumulates in the rubber casing. And I notice that there are microscopic scratches all over the plane body, which only show up near the edges of speculars. there's probably other kinds of wear, just get photo references. oh yeah, don't model panel lines or scratches it's what texturing is for.

correct me if i'm wrong but, i think just about everyone who's textured a valk is clearly missing a point, those panel lines that you see on the toy and in the tv series and movie, they're not supposed to be actually mapped onto the valk as colors. They're panel lines!!! If you're gonna put them on, at least put some rust or dirt or wear and tear along them so that they look like edges between metal panels instead of spray painted black lines.

efficient modelling and linking camera distance to render quality and some of the other tricks ARE skills you know. B) from my experience with MR you can get very nice looking results with low settings and render time is not significantly longer than Maya,i think you just need to find the balance there. i mean I tried some methods like arraying a dozen lights in close proximity to each other and have them act as one light source, and arraying 48-64 low intensity directional lights to fake GI, but MR with low quality settings is actually faster and about the same quality. I don't know about how it works with high resolution high quality productions though... havn't done one yet :\ do you have any rendered animation i can check out? and just how bad is the flickering you descriped? I learned that flickering in maya is often produced by the texture and you can get rid of it simply by tuning the pre-filter on the file node and be careful with using specular. and uh datterboy, with maya you go to the render globals and set the format to either IFF or AVI and set the render range, camera, etc. then go render/batch render. you can still use the interface while rendering, so you can work on another scene or something/ but you'll need to set a ram usage limit , and lots and lots of ram. you can playback IFF sequences with the maya Fcheck.

you don't need FG, caustics and GI all at once, i find that a lot of people only need one element with the addition of environment mapping or some maya basic texturing at any given time, and it's really not that time consuming if you're efficient with modelling and not building too much geometry where you don't need it. besides you can use light groups for separate objects or objects/background and link # of photons or # of FG rays to distance to camera, this will save considerable amount of render time. MR is more time consuming than other render algorithms but it's not that scary if you use it right. btw, does anyone know if they used Vray to render M:0 or did they use something else?

why not use mental ray for maya? :\ it comes with maya 5.0 B)

from this tutorial i saw, final gather tends to produce a more accurate global illumination effect in areas that light would slip into in the real world but won't be lit with lights in maya. I don't fully understand it yet but i just think of it as a good fill light. i think the right way to do it is FG just for lighting and use lights only for specular,.

mental ray for maya 5 final gather 3 point lighting with area lights

maya5

trying out new ways to render with an old model.

send me that SDF model!!!!!!!!!!!1