Digdug's rendering corner

[digdug]

I've been asked to show how I re-render Transcendence resources.

I'm going to post a step by step tutorial of what I do starting with the next ship I re-render.

The softwares I use are Bryce 7.1 and Wings3D (1.4.1.2011-04-15---12-16.mlab version since I take advantage of some experimental boolean operations, but any wings3d version is good)

This is also related to a tutorial for Bryce 5.5c that I made long time ago http://neurohack.com/transcendence/foru ... f=8&t=2270
Most of the stuff in there is still valid.

If you want to try Bryce, you may download this:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/720869/Bryce%2 ... OURCES.rar

It contains:
- an empty rendering studio for ships for Bryce 5.5c
- an empty rendering studio for ships for Bryce 7.1 (updated and looking better)
- an empty item studio
- weapon studio
- reactor studio
- launcher studio
- planet studio
- Bryce materials for transcendence in Bryce MAT format. (it contains the materials I prepared and encountered until now)

Bryce is an awkward program, better suited for panoramas, but most of the things I do can be done in other rendering softwares, like Blender.

Most of the steps that you will see here are done to fix the problems of exported models from Truespace. In particular, when exporting, you will lose most of the textures and some models will be garbled, like this (CSC reactors):

or this (hole of the reactor arm is closed):


If you can use Truespace, probably you don't need most of the stuff in this thread.

[digdug]

First example: Ferian Hive

Open the rendering studio for ships for Bryce 7.1

Import the feriancolony.scn

You are presented with something that doesn't resemble the Ferian station at all. The model has lost all the textures and additional spheres are scattered around the model.
First thing to do is rotate the model by 90 degrees on the y axis (Y is the vertical axis in Bryce, in other modelers it could be Z)
then Select using CTRL+mouse click and delete the additional spheres. I then applied AsteroidSurface.JPG to the asteroid part of the model. A quick rendering showed a decent looking Ferian hive with resembling the original one made by George.

Next I turned off the "Back Light" in the rendering scene. I wanted sharper shadows, the original Ferian Hive is very dark on the not-illuminated side.

I then applied FerianArmor.jpg onto the spheres protruding from the asteroid. I then started fiddling with the texture settings trying to reproduce George's texture. This was much more difficult than I though, the texture showed really washed up when I applied some transparencies or too dark and with patches when not transparent. Even if the transparent version of the texture is esthetically interesting (see rendering image 3), what I wanted to do was to reproduce the original hive.

So I went on and created my own Ferian-like texture. It's a simple camo-texture created with a free plugin then blurred a little. This texture was then applied to the spheres with a high ambience, so that they seems sef-illuminating in the dark. I then duplicated the spheres objects, resized them a little (0.1% larger or around 0.02 units larger) and applied HexGridMask.bmp as a texture, with transparency and a high specularity (so it's white reflective in illuminated parts but black in not-illuminated, like George's one) The spheres are unfortunately clustered together in a single mesh after the conversion so the hexgrid does not cover follow the spheres perfectly, but it good enough. (In the future I could create new spheres to replace the garbled ones)

Lastly, I toned up the bump mapping of the asteroid texture, adjusted the "main light" (100 units of light less) and did a rendering (image4). It looks pretty close to George's

[RPC]

Can I ask for this to be stickied and put in modding reference?

[FourFire]

"Is that the matrix?"
"How do you read the code?"
"after a while you stop seeing code, just here a blonde, here a brunette..."
- How I feel like Neo while staring at what seems to be the fugly **** which comes onscreen when a DVD player shits itself.

(Google Chrome dev beta)

[KA101]

Ah, I have Bryce 4 kicking around somewhere. Good program.

I'll presume FourFire & I have the same problem: whatever those Ferian Hive shots are supposed to be, they look like some fae-forsaken test pattern to this particular Firefox (whatever the latest version is) installation. Each is a hash of colors in various patterns; some stuff on the screenshot thread went the same way.

The Bryce shots came out OK.

[digdug]

the images are clearly corrupted.
I will replace them

[digdug]

Interestingly, I don't have anymore the original images, but I can show some of the renderings I did.
Most importantly, I found a copy of the texture I made for the Ferian Spheres.