Lightwave

Betterspace was a series of tutorials that originally appeared on the site ap3d.com. Unfortunately they disappeared from the Net sometime in the last 5 years. What is presented here are the tutorials that I was able to resurrect thanks to a program called Warrick that is able to use sites like the Wayback machine and the Google cache.

BetterSpace

The final touch, and the one that is most often done badly in CG space scenes, is adding decent lighting to the scene. All the hard work you've put into building and texturing your objects will be a complete waste of effort if your lighting sucks.

BetterSpace

BetterSpace

So far we have used our the detail panel image that we created in the last lesson to apply a fairly generic texture to some of our object. While this technique is fine for smaller areas, larger and more prominent areas need to have texture maps specially painted for them, in order that the texture accentuates the detail that is already there.

BetterSpace

(front / perspective view) Layer 1

BetterSpace

So now we have built a fairly decent object with lots of surface detail, but there are still large areas of pristine flat colour, and we need to break these up a bit.

BetterSpace

Now that we have looked fairly extensively at how to add detail to flat panels, and now we have the more challenging task of adding detail to the curved front face of our object.

BetterSpace

In the previous lesson we looked at the basic techniques for creating details on flat surfaces that are perpendicular to X, Y or Z.

Now we will start to look at how to detail surfaces that are not so conveniently oriented.

BetterSpace

One of the biggest giveaways that a spaceship has been created in a computer rather than as a practical model is the lack of surface detail that is nearly always apparent.

BetterSpace

With the painting of the nebula map done, we can get on with the fun part, and start rendering some nice images of our nebula sitting in a glorious starry sky.

We can also do some tweaking to the nebula in the scene, to make it fit the requirements of our particular scene.