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1992-02-26
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@6 Imagine Textures and Lights.
============================
@5
By Richard Martin
=================
@4
Maybe some of Amoszines readers have a basic knowledge of Imagine?
Well perhaps some hints and tips are in order. The two things I'll
look into here are Textures and different lighting effects. By the
way I don't claim to be a Craig Collins, and I haven't the Ram to
try and do anything too ambitious, so please don't ask me to help
with a 50 object recreation of "The Battle of the Line" (Babylon 5
Episode 8- It was stunning.)
Before I start with the two subjects here are some general hints.
First off my current "Imagine" project is to do a multi-disk Ray
Traced Intro for Space Adventures 1 my best and most ambitious
AMOS project to date. So obviously Space Battles are the main thing
required. So what I did was video record EVERY episode of Babylon 5
(Not only because it is the greatest science fiction show EVER!)
on some 8 2.5 hour tapes. (Including the Pilot). After doing this
I spent several nights going over the best Space Dogfights and
Catastrophic combats. I freeze framed key parts and continually
played back sections from several episodes. I examined what Ron
Thorton and Foundation Imaging did to make his battles the best.
If you know anyone with a load of videoed B5's then I suggest that
you borrow the following episodes:
Episode 1: "Midnight on the Firing Line"
Episode 8: (The one with the recreation of the "Battle of the Line")
The episode when the raiders attack Babylon 5.
Examine them and learn from them. With a bit of thought you can
create similar effects.
Textures:
=========
There are two pictures in the Imagine Archive. They are both of an
Allosaurus, (A flesh eating dinosaur, of a lesser size of a T-Rex).
One has been given a simple green attribute and rendered. The second
has been given a simple texture map. The texture mapped one looks
very different and a whole lot more realistic. What I did was use
the Camo texture on the dino. It was given 4 colour spots at values
of 3 shades of green and 1 brown. The spot area is about 8.88. It
creates a rather nice dino skin effect I thought. Textures can make
the difference between a realsitic object or not. But don't use the@4
textures for the sake of using them. They are a tad memory hungry,
and in some cases dramatically slow down rendering.
Light Sources:
==============
The other point, light sources are very usefull. I tend to have
on light source above and to one side of my main object for a nice
lighting effect. There is an animation from my Space Adventures
animated intro. It is only 7 frames long but when played you will
notice that there is a red flash where the gun fired. This effect
was acheived simply by setting up the animation like so:
The Spaceship stays still at all frames. On frame 2, two red light
sources at intesity R 555 G 000 B 000 are added for one frame at
the points where the lazer appears, then they are moved via the path.
If you wanted to change the colour of the lazer, change the light
intesity to. For example for a green lazer try the settings for the
light at:
R:000
G:555
B:000
@4And for a purple lazer:
R:555
G:000
B:555
The thing most people don't seem to realise is that the maximum light
intesity is not 255. You can have very bright lights indeed. A value
of 1000 creates a very,very bright light. I used 555 so that enough
of the ship was lighted very brightly, yet not so bright the ship was
all red.
You can use this animation in your own products as long as Richard
Martin is credited for the creation of it. And please mention that
you got the anim from AMOSZINE as well. Many thanks.
@7
Richard Martin
@1