hey Michael…
how are things friend?
you may post your updates later but don’t be away for a long time… we, your fans and friends, are missing your presence…
your good observations and crits… and simply you…
the best of luck in your XSI researches and cheers my friend… 
Grand Space Opera 3D Entry: Michael Crawford
greentek
#221
nuclearman
#222
Hi, Paul,
Slowly catching up on sleep, my friend, and undoing the damage to my eyes from too many nights of rendering until 3 or 4 a.m. My eyes were so bloodshot a couple of days ago that I was afraid I might have some kind of eye infection, but the vessels are gradually returning to normal so that’s good news.
It’s pretty clear by now that I have very little chance of making the deadline, since shipping the workstation to Seattle really isn’t an option. (Too expensive, since I’d have to ship the monitor, too, and just not worth putting the system at risk.) Still, once I’ve had a little more time to recuperate I will probably start posting new progress and checking in on other threads, though not as regularly as before – my 80-200mm Nikkor lens has arrived and I need to get used to it before heading north. (The thing is an absolute monster, but fortunately I’ll be taking a sturdy Manfrotto tripod with it and should get some great shots of Mt. Rainier.)
What else? Oh: I’ve been studying diagrams of the Princeton tokamak reactor, and have decided that’s what I really should’ve been building for the center of the reactor dome. May take some time to get it constructed, but it will give the domes a functional look that’s been sadly lacking from my previous attempts. Anyway, that’s what is going on here.
Claudio: No, you’re most certainly not blind – it’s just that I had to break the scene up into several different tasks to make it easier to work with the pieces. All of the earlier modeled stuff is still there (elsewhere on the hard drive, if you want to be specific), and will eventually be pulled together in a series of render passes … oh, probably in April or May, at this rate. (Aaaaagh!)
Ashishdantu: Thanks, dood! (And what’s with all this “buttrock” stuff? I thought “buttrock” was what becomes of your gluteals after you sit at the computer too long!)
Penumbrae: Thanks, but I’m afraid any “new” techniques are strictly in the service of some pretty shopworn ideas: the Fuller domes were popular in the SF films of the 1970s, and this “jump gate” stuff is really a mishmash of BABYLON 5 and STARGATE (not to mention a few hundred SF novels of the past forty years).
Stefano: Glad to see you back online! I’m afraid, though, that the “plasma” is a poor substitute for the genuine article. 
When I did a more thorough investigation – try Googling “plasma” and “fusion” – it was clear I wasn’t even in the same time-zone as the real stuff produced in prototype fusion reactors! Now, on the one hand, this doesn’t really matter: no final render is going to carry a caption which reads “fusion reactor” with an arrow pointed to the device. Besides, it’s questionable how much of the “reactor” is actually going to be visible in the image.
On the other hand, as Paul has pointed out, it absolutely does matter from the standpoint of simulating real-world phenomena. If I try to produce, say, a waterfall, and it doesn’t look like a waterfall … well, I’ve got a problem, right? And right now, after having investigated this further, I’m inclined to say you’re not going to get anything approximating “real” plasma with a particle system unless you’re in the millions – if not billions – of particles, as you get with “Doc” Baily’s Spore rendering system. (Perhaps there’s a solution involving custom sprites, but I haven’t tried that approach yet.) So … that’s where things stand. If I build a good tokamak reactor, then it won’t really matter what the plasma looks like inside, right? 
userBrian
#223
Would like to see a composition test of all your models in a scene.
Are you going to have some ships entering the jumpgate? I think the
composition/perspective of this scene would be interesting. I think that
could be made with the city/jumpgate closer to the front with a huge ship(s)
emerging. I think you’d get lots of comments/ideas then. Cool work.
I won’t read the tiny lettering within the images though. Don’t want the
eyestrain. I’d keep the writing outside the image.
terraarc
#224
Michael, glad to hear news from you!
Speaking of your new camera, I had this idea concerning health and this competition…when I’m about to start texturing I’ll spent a WHOLE day wondering around the town I sit in (Patras) taking photos of various staff, drinking some coffee in the morning, taking some lunch at noon, in order to use as textures…it’ll be a nice break chance…
Just popping some ideas…have fun with the camera anyway!! :bounce:
As for the plasma matter, I think speaking of an extraterrestial civilization with really advanced technology leaves quite a threshold for developing different approaches to generators and mechanics of any type, so the realistic part (always my opinion) is only a WYSIWYG matter…I don’t think that you need some human interpretation and technological approach on the plasma reactor…Maybe that strange civilization uses some “grsdwefsv technology” which produces some amazingly different effect on plasma… (it’s fiction all the way)…
Sorry for the extended descriptions on my thoughts of plasma generator…just opinions :shrug:
Hoping to here news and updates as soon as you feel you’re ready!
Climax
#225
Hello Michael! you have done cool but weird updates, i hope you bring all pieces together soon to see how it’s going in the whole :bounce:
greentek
#226
absolutely right statement…! i can only agree…
cheers my friend…
oh… and congrats with new camera…!!! good news!
Doublecrash
#227
Answer 1: Oh, man, don’t say this! Not only your postings are really precious for all the XSI beginners out there like me, but I consider yours one of the most interesting entries of the many I’m following closely. So I’m asking you… if you won’t meet the deadline, will you finish the image all the same? I really hope so.
Answer 2: I could agree with you. But (and this involves Answer 3 below) we’re talking 3D art here… so, if it’s sure that phisical accuracy is really important, on the other hand you just don’t have to stick to it. My opinion, from a mere aesthetic point of view, was that the particle-plasma you put together was really cool looking. Simple as that. Personally, I tend to give more importance to visual impact, specially in a context (with x or s, it’s really the same) like this.
Answer 3: Yes, from that standpoint, I can’t but agree with Paul.
Stefano
nuclearman
#228
Stefano: Hey, just because I’m not likely to make the deadline and not spending as much time on this doesn’t mean I’m not going to complete my scene. It just means I’m going to take the time and do things right – a better long-term strategy for me – rather than cut corners just to make a deadline. There are quite a few fairly basic tasks I’m still trying to get the hang of, particularly with NURBS, and a few extra days invested now means weeks saved later down the line, when I’m trying to get complex things put together for my novel.
Besides, I can always use my own site to host a detailed step-by-step on some of the more exhaustive explorations once the Challenge is over. (I just did a comprehensive test this weekend of the various glass shaders and how they interact with HDRI light probes, so if you ever want to see the subtle variations from one shader to the next I can send you the pics.)
Getting back to the issue of “plasma” versus “eye candy”: Okay, here’s the thing: the “gold standard” for plasma-type effects is “Doc” Baily’s work with the Spore rendering system, as demonstrated in Steven Soderbergh’s remake of SOLARIS. Spore uses billions of particles to produce dancing, billowing, diaphanous effects, and it’s really quite breathtaking to behold. Houdini can also do some pretty amazing particle effects (see the opening sequence for CONTACT if you have any doubts), but XSI has never been known for having particularly robust particle tools. That, of course, hasn’t stopped me from testing out what can – and can’t – be done with them. With a powerful enough system, you can generate in the neighborhood of a half-million or more particles without crashing mental ray, but even using the “burn” controls and static blur it’s not enough to reproduce anything like the Spore output. The “blob” shader does somewhat better, from the perspective of “eye candy,” but I still have to agree with Paul that faking the effects with layers of procedurals and/or texture maps will produce a more convincing result for stills and some animation work. Anyway, I’d love to take the time to explore what you can achieve by mixing the two approaches, but that will simply have to wait until I’ve got more time.
greentek
#229
hi Michael…
soon i’ll start making this plasma fireball so i can show some stuff faking plasma and similar things…
untill later and cheers…
P.S. i still hope you can arrange something and keep your work my friend…
Climax
#230
C’mon Michael…POST! you are doing a real great job, don’t let us down!
I wish u had a merry Chistmas and that you will have a very Happy new year, Greentek is also lost in Space…You are really missed in the challenge
Come on friends!,…FIGHT!!
userBrian
#232
The most important thing is meeting the deadline. In professional work. Luckily
I can paint in PS on my Wacom anything I need in post. While working at an NBC
studio I once did 100 cartoons overnight! They picked me up in a Limo.
So I’d say get fast and finish. Don’t worry about perfection.
Gunilla
#235
Hey Michael! I believe we all want to see this one get finished sometimes, so keep us posted, right?
Good luck for your ongoing project, I just wanted to stop by and thank you for all the help with this challenge, and see you in a future one
nuclearman
#236
Gunilla: Sorry I wasn’t able to post while in Seattle, but between an extraordinarily slow internet connection – text would load, but images seemed to stall out, making it unfeasible to follow the contest – and some construction work I had to do for my grandparents, it just wasn’t in the cards.
I’m very to glad to see that you’ve continued to make progress on your scene. I’d hoped to get back to work on “The Waterhole” and post some comments when I got back here on the 10th, but within 36 hours of my arrival I was hit with a severe workstation malfunction – namely, the computer inexplicably ran “checkdisk” on startup, found and “corrected” a series of “problems” … and then wouldn’t recognize the CD-ROM drive, the modem, and the communications port my dongle is attached to! I spent three days working with the technical support folks at HP, trying to hunt down the problem, but in the end the only solution they could come up with was to completely wipe the hard drive and then reload every last bit of my software! Aaaaaargh!
As a result, I spent most of last night backing up everything to the Seagate external drive, and just completed reloading the operating system within the past hour. The good news: the modem works, the CD-ROM drive works, and (fingers crossed!) I should have XSI up and running again by this evening. I’m just really, really glad I decided to reassess my chances of making the contest deadline back at the end of November, because otherwise I would’ve been tearing my hair out over this setback!
Anyway … I’m back, and I will take the time to get this scene finished, even though there’s no way to make the contest deadline. I’ll keep you posted, and hope to see you in the next “Challenge”! Best of luck getting your final image completed!
Mike: Hope you had a great New Year! Lots of luck wrapping up your project; I was able to take a look at the progress you’ve made over the past month and you’ve done some amazing work!
Sascha: Awesome final image! Glad to see you got everything pulled together in impressive fashion, and a belated Happy New Year to you, too!
Brian: Yes, I realize that meeting the deadline is the most important thing in professional work. Unfortunately, it was clear by late November that I could either spend the time before I had to take off for Seattle working on the Challenge … or getting the rest of my work (3000+ photographs from a month-long shoot in Washington State) backed up and protected. I chose the latter. It was, I assure you, a professional decision: I could not afford to risk having anything happen to those pictures.
Claudio: I’m baaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!
Omar: Great to see you’re still in the hunt, my friend! I’m sorry to have been among the “casualties” in this contest, but a cursory examination of the attrition rate indicates that some 80-90 percent of the contestants have dropped out. In my own case, previous travel plans made it clear I had to be close to finishing by late November if I were to have any chance of completing the contest, since I wouldn’t have access to my workstation for almost a third of the contest’s running time (!). Hope to see you in the NEXT contest, and best of luck in the judging stages!
Paul: See you next time, I hope!
Fahrija
#237
Hi Michael,
good to see you back.
I´m looking forward to see further development and I´ll watch out for new incredible output in case you post it here somewhere.
best regards
Fahrija
Gunilla
#238
Hey nuclearman - you’re back! Good to see you - you’ve been greatly missed around here
Thanks for stopping by my thread, your advices have always been really good. Again, a big thanks for all feedback since the challenge started. I’m sorry abot your computer troubles - thoise things can really be a nightmare. Good thing your photographs wheren’t damaged!
Good luck for your project, keep me posted on your updates, ok?
EricClaeys
#239
The special effects you are using add a very nice look to things - plenty of variety.
Climax
#240
It’s good to see you are all right Michael! I wish U the best and hopefully we meet again in the next Challenge