Grand Space Opera 3D Entry: Michael Crawford

#141

• I allways when comming to your thread want to make a helpfull crit, but I just can’t find what to crit! :shrug: you are doing an outstanding job here, :slight_smile:

#142

It’s been awhile since I’ve worked with particles in XSI, and this is really my first time working with them in 4.0. A couple changes I’ve noticed: while there are now particle goals, and a lot of upgrades in the ability to tweak simulations, one thing seems to be missing (!) – the ability to just freeze a particle cloud and then perform deformations on the frozen cloud. If that control is still there, I’m not sure where it’s hiding; I couldn’t find it mentioned in the manual.

I also got a nasty shock with some renders which placed a light inside the particle cloud to simulate the light coming from the plasma ball: horrendous red blotches on the “containment cage.” I’ll have to experiment with turning the shadow-casting feature off, but at the moment I’m a bit dismayed to have no way to boost the light coming from the plasma ball that doesn’t produce artifacts. I must be missing some key bit of information, as this seems like the kind of bug that would be caught in beta.

Anyway, I’m headed for another long night of rendering, and will no doubt try out some different containment devices, as this one was repurposed from an early experiment in designing components for the Waterhole station.

#143

Nice imrovements since I last visited your thread. I can also see that there is a problem with the dense latticed dome. The fusion core is shaping up great, I wish I had a suggestion on your illumination problem! One thing I could do in Max is up the illumination of the plasma sphere material and make the sphere react in only one light source (excluding it from all the others both receiving and casting shadows), without any visual impact because the sphere already is a light source… (Perhaps it’s not what you want!!)

Keep it up! Always inspiring and eye-candy! :thumbsup:

#144

Excellent work you did here!! :bounce:
Nice modeling, and texture.
And the test with the particule, is very amazing!!
Waiting to see more.

Keep going!! You make very nice work!!:buttrock:

#145

that looks really promising!
Can’t wait to see the core in context!

good luck with that particle lighting problem!

#146

The blotches are the light filtered through the particles so they act as a gel? Turning the shadows off wouldn’t fix that, right? Can you lower the refraction of the particles to zero and increase their transparency? That might make the blotches at least smaller.

OTOH, it might easily be that I have no idea what I’m talking about. :smiley:

But it still looks good. :thumbsup:

#147

hi Michael…
i don’t know how it’s in XSI but in max you can use feature called Snapshot… it converts your particles to the mesh… but i may suggest you to use object shap as particles emiter and set particles speed to zero… by changing the shape of the object you’ll change actual shape of particles system… but i think to simulate plasma ball it’s better to use few spheres containing each other and texture them properly… also you’ll need to make some post glow effects (kind of electric and gaseous) for each sphere… unfortunately i don’t know how to explane it more clear and exactly how it works in XSI…
for lighting you should remove shadow casting from the light illuminating plasma ball from inside and exclude illumination of other objects except plasma ball… and you need another light inside ball simulating illumination of the ball but in this case you have to exclude plasma ball itself from illumination… for proper shadows just map light…
hop you can understand through my horrible english what i’m trying to explane… :smiley:
cheers…

#148

Paul, you’re absolutely right: although I’d been using the sphere with the sun texture as the emitter, I can certainly use a separate texture-mapped sphere for that, set the visibility of the sphere itself to zero, and use shape jitter to get the variation in the particle depth … but I’m still at a loss as to why Softimage would remove the “freeze cloud” control! When I was using particles to do some Saturn-type rings a couple of years back, I was able to build up some really dense, finely-grained rings by running a simulation to the pointed where I was happy with a layer, freezing the simulation at that point, and then simply duplicating and rotating the frozen particle cloud to get the effect I was after. To not be able to do that in 4.0 strikes me as very odd, so I’m sure I’m just missing something in how they’ve modified the workflow in the simulation module. (The “freeze cloud” control was at the very top of the particle controls in previous versions of XSI.)

I’m only using frame 13 of the simulation, but it’s still bothersome to have to crank through the calculations to get to that frame each time I load the scene. Maybe I should look in the operator stack for a solution.

Anyway, I can try the “multiple sphere” approach, since that avoids the problem with using more than one light in the scene, and I can always try incorporating a layer of the “cigarette smoke shader” to get a translucent gaseous effect on the outside of the nested spheres, but I was trying to use particles because I was going to incorporate some addition tendril-like emitters so that the plasma seemed to swirl up towards the ball. It’s all doable with transparency and textures, but it’s very cool to run simulations 'cause then you can actually see the effect in action. Sigh. Anyway, I’ll go ahead and post the render that has the artifacts in it just so everyone can see what I mean.

Thanks again for the suggestions – it’s extraordinarily helpful to get this kind of input when I’m having problems like this. Thumbs up! :slight_smile:

#149

Vlatko, that was my first thought: when the light was filtering through the particles it wasn’t picking up the alpha in the billboards and was thus treating them like gel sheets casting sharply angular colored shadows. The thing is, they – the particles – are only supposed to cast shadows on each other with the way things are set up. The self-shadowing is needed because otherwise there’s no illusion of depth or delineation between the particles, resulting in a look that’s even flatter than what you get when you simply texture the sphere with no bump, no transparency, etc. So … I tried moving the second light outside the cloud, but still got the artifacts appearing all over the glass – even on the side that technically shouldn’t have been affected! I’ll try using a Lambert shader for the containment cage and see whether this bizarre problem is simply a byproduct of the glass shader / particle interaction, or whether it’s definitely a mental ray bug.

BTW, I don’t have control over the refraction level because this isn’t using the “blob” shader, which is used for fluids (I could try the fluid simulator, but the render times for the fluid shaders, which work similarly to metaballs, used to be horrendously long – I’m not sure about how it is with mental ray 3.3 though).

#150

Mike: Thanks! I’ll test out changing what can receive shadows and see if that solves the problem. Ideally, I’d like to simply have the particles all give off illumination and simply dispense with additional sources, but I suspect that kind of simulation would bring the supercomputers at Los Alamos to their knees! :slight_smile:

Lombardo: Thanks again! I’ll trade you my particle and illumination problems for your color adjustment troubles. :slight_smile:

Lehmi: Many thanks for the support! I’m dying to see this work properly, since I’ve seen internally-lit latticework models in films and the effect can be really beautiful. The catch is that those models were made of “real” components: thousands of custom-molded platic and resin bits and pieces, with real lights, hundreds of yards of wiring, and a team of technicians all working to get things to come out just right. You wouldn’t happen to have a spare fx team you could loan me? :wink:

#151

The regular Freeze button (the one you use for everything else) works for particles too. Just go to the frame you want to freeze and Edit->Freeze.

#152

damn, there was one ringing my doorbell this afternoon… If I had known that you’re in need of it… now I have send them home :frowning:

well, it’s against the contest rules anyway… but next time i’ll probably give them your adress :wink:

#153

gent_k: Thanks! Much appreciated!

#154

The plasmaball is comin nicely - I really like the “cage” for it. With 30.000 particles it sounds like you’re beginning to get into trouble with render times, right? :slight_smile:

I’m beginning to loose touch with where you are in the final composition - have you got any updated renders for the final image?

excellent work as ususal, just keep going!

#155

• :eek: Man! now I know where your avatar comes From!! :thumbsup:

#156

Gunilla: In answer to your question, I have been playing around with layouts and how to present the scene, but so much is dependent upon how the pieces actually look together. (Yes, I realize that careful planning would probably help me avoid wasted effort, but I’ve found that it’s one thing to have a clear vision in your mind, and another to make the renders come out the way you want them to.) I have a LOT more experience doing ad copy and advertising layout than designing complex 3D scenes, so when push comes to shove and I find that final deadline fast approaching, I’m liable to jetison those things that aren’t working and go for a more pared-down look – which will probably bring me closer to “iconic” but will surely represent pragmatism winning out over ambition. I’m experimenting with techniques and stylistic effects and just getting more familiar with aspects of XSI to learn how to use, rather than being “linear” and directed towards a set goal.

Anyway, your remarks got me to actually try out a few simple layouts with the pieces at hand, and what I quickly learned was that the more I left out, the more I liked what was on screen. That’s not going to stop me from trying to complete a useable model of the Waterhole Alpha space station, but it does remind me of the old adage that sometimes “less is more.” :slight_smile:

So until I get more of the details whipped into shape, here’s my “best guess” of how I’ll be lining up the pieces. Earlier today I rendered one of the drafts of the Kahir Scout Ship pointing towards the jump gate and the camera positioned so it was close to the hull and sighting down the “body” of the ship towards the gate. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the lighting adjusted right; as a result, the ship looked a bit washed out, so I dropped it from this image in favor of a “movie poster” approach.

#157

Omar, if I recall correctly, the avatar is a picture of one of the Johnson Island hydrogen bomb tests from the late 1950s. I used the picture for a t-shirt design about a decade ago – hence the handle, “Nuclearman.” You might be amused to learn there was actually an atomic bomb test as the Nevada Test Site that was code-named “Climax.” Lots of great pictures of that one available on the internet. :slight_smile:

#158

hi Michael…
and how to get it?
are you going to use poster style?

#159

Paul: Quite possibly … but another possibility would be to change the dimensions of the space station slightly so it better accomodates a horizontal format. Again, I’m more concerned at the moment with trying to complete the fusion core. Did some experiments with using fluid simulation rather than the standard particles, and discovered a few tricks that I’ll be putting to use on the borealis-effect for the jump gate. I will post those discoveries this evening, as I just have to throw together an explanation of what I was trying to do and the screen caps are good to go. :slight_smile: However, I got completely sidetracked by the new effects and didn’t push through a solution on the fusion core. Aaargh! I’m so easily distracted.

#160

well horizontal format is not prob… in some cases it has advantage… probably i’ll be forced to use protret layout as well… but i’m asking about general style…
sorry mate but i didn’t think poster style is right choise to follow…
i think you have to rethink your compositional tasks and invent more expressive way to represent your idea…
but sure i’m getting properly what you meant…