Software

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.

Journeyman Games, has just announced a Kickstarter for a new program, Wild Card Creator. The purpose of the program is to simplify the creating of characters for various settings by coming up with a way to read in a PDF that the user owns and converting the information into the necessary program elements, like finding all the new Edges, Skills and, possibly, the Equipment.

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.

BetterSpace

Now that we have built the geometry and prepared the surface attributes for our nebula, we must get on with the really important part of the nebula and paint the image map.

BetterSpace

BetterSpace

Now that we have built the geometry for our starfield, we can start to add more realistic surfaces and set rendering options so that we can finally render our new starfield scene.

A lot of the techniques described here were initially suggested by Mojo of Foundation Imaging, so if you recognise some settings, that's where they're from.

BetterSpace

The first, and arguably the most obvious visual cue to the viewer that they are looking at an image showing outer space is the presence of a vast, sprawling starfield against the inky blackness of space.

IBM created a video entitled "The Powers of Ten" back in the late 1970s that demonstrated the scale of things in the universe by zooming out a distance equal to adding another zero to the starting scale and then zoomed in by removing zeroes from the number down to the smallest distance known.