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SECTION 8 - Essence Settings and Other Attributes

         Here's a great tip for created good spaceship textures: use a
 light DINOSKIN texture (with only a slight variation of Your main colour
 applied to the object) with the bumpiness set to 0%, this will give a
 nice colour variation on the object instead of just a plain colour.  You
 may have to increase the dinoskin size for various object sizes to start
 to look good.


         Now just apply the DETHSTAR texture, You need to have a big size
 for DETHSTAR to make it look good so increase the default size and take
 down the "dirt" and increse the "rust".


         Apply large amounts of specularity and hardness and there You
 go, a nice spaceship texture.  I have uploaded two pics to demonstrate
 (ftp to tomahawk.welch.jhu.edu/pub/lw/framestores/ship.jpg and
 ship2.jpg).


         Ship.JPG uses the nebula texture with Imagine lens-flares to
 create a nice engine glow.  A good way to create Lightwave lens-flares
 in Imagine (as used in Ship2.JPG) is to get a Lightwave user (boo, hiss)
 to render a full screen lens-flare on a black background with
 lens-reflections off.


         Now convert the image from whatever format into TGA/TIF/IFF
 using whatever resolution You want (the bigger the better).  Use this as
 a brushmap TWICE on a 1x1 plane... once as an opacity map and secondly
 as a filter map (set to reverse image) so the darker parts with be
 see-through.  Now make it bright and render it....  It should look like
 a fully fledged Lightwave lens-flare in Imagine.


         To place it in a scene make sure it's aligned to the object
 "camera" and large enough to look good.  The lens-reflections (the
 coloured spots of light) can be applied to great effect by using a
 package such as PhotoStyler using a large low opacity round brush and
 whatever colour You want to compliment the picture (reds greens and
 blues are best).  I've managed to successfully trick my Lightwave owning
 friend using this technique by rendering Babylon5 type scenes which
 exhaustingly use lens-flares for each scene.



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