Texturing an Abaddon

I noticed a few people were interested in the processes involved with importing the models into cinema so i rendered out a little bit of an animation showing how the ship looks at each stage of the process.

 Not much to say about it really i learned a little bit about camera animation, namely how to stop it from accelerating and decelerating at the beginning and end of its' path but that's about it.

 Anyway here it is:

More breakthroughs!

So this morning i set myself a task. I was going to get at least one model to remotely resemble the effects of the in-game shaders or die trying. After watching the excellent "The girl with a dragon tattoo" my nerd senses were a-tinglin' and my google instinct was fierce. 

I'd had the idea yesterday, that if i could somehow get one of the nice danel shader textures as the base for the models' texture then use the texture maps supplied by ccp to simply add the detail then i'd be able to emulate the nice metalic "sheens" achieved in-game. Now i'd know how to do this in photoshop in an instant but figured that the process in C4D would be quite different and avoided it by cheating with lighting to get the desired look or picking very bland ships to model.

Then it hit me. If i used the specular map or diffuse map in the texture alpha channel for a layer it would only allow the metalic danel to show through where the alpha map was white and since this is on the armor plates etc in the alpha map then only the plates would look metallic!

Anyway that's enough incoherent (most likely miss-used) jargon from me.

TL;DR - Alpha channel is awesome. I'm awesome. Everyone is awesome. Better models incoming. That is all.

Here's the result.

Looks better, no?

All these worlds

I was really slow churning this piece out. What with trouble getting the textures looking how i wanted and again atmosphere problems i had to do quite  few workarounds which are tedious and irritating....

I got the inspiration for it after seeing this image from the Tyrannis trailer:

I'd had the idea for an "amarrian invasion" scene for a few days before hand and remembered seeing this when looking for Charon reference images for my last piece. The ominous, looming fleet descending on a hopeless world was the exact sort of feel i wanted and so i set to work.

As mentioned i had some trouble with textures on the Archons. Mainly it's getting the armored plates to look that sort of golden color that befits the Amarr ships whilst keeping the dark body of the ship black, lightened only by the dotted lights. I managed to get around it anyway with some use of alpha'd textures and a little lighting but i really need to figure out the "proper" way of building these ships up.

I did have a  breakthrough on the Minmatar station and Templar fighters realizing that the models seem to have inbuilt selections that you can use to limit a textures application to different parts of a model. I shall have to investigate further!

Also i discovered a cool way to make "machine-gun fire" with volumetric lighting. Let me know what you think!

Anyway here's the finished piece. Yet again i could have added more ships but i really wanted to get this one out of the way by the end and felt i was cluttering it up:

All These Worlds
http://i.imgur.com/t2j6W.jpg 


Let me know what you think!

Autopilot disabled. Way point reached.

Had quite a lot of work to do with this one, mainly because i had to export a lot more stuff than with previous renders. Fortunately i was clever about it and separated all the different ships and stations into individual .C4D files so if i need them again in future i have them already pre-textured!

Anyhoo, I got my inspiration for this piece from a picture I saw online:

The seemingly endless stream of ships tailing off into the distance with such a monochromatic color pallete really struck me. 

So I set to work , naturally starting with the Charon, the main focus of the image being the cargo ship I wanted to build the scene around that. The first challenge was finding a Caldari station  as wide as that of the image. Unfortunately, there are none. Or at least there are none that look good when zoomed into so close... So i cloned one a few times, arranged it using the perspective of the camera to make it appear as one and took care not to leave any gaps or unusual structures. After that it was pretty much a case of export > texture > import > place for the rest of the ships and then a little added lighting to make them appear as i wanted. I did, however, run into a little snag when applying the atmosphere to the planet but in the end i just rendered the image out twice and fixed them together in photoshop!

I'm fairly happy with how it turned out, i probably could have done a better job on the lighting but after i worked out a better way to work it my project was so littered with lights i couldn't be bothered rooting them all out! I also could have added a few more ships but i felt i was just cluttering the picture and nothing much was being added for it.

Anyway, here's the final image.

Caldari Convoy
http://i.imgur.com/AlVBb.jpg 

Let me know your thoughts!

Dipping More Toes

Getting footage for eve machinima or images for general use can be a pain in the ass. You can spend weeks looking for good pvp footage, and hours trying to get the scenic stuff just right. Not to mention Gigs upon gigs of files :rolleyes:.


As a result I've kind of gotten all pissy with frapsing stuff and of late and have been looking back to my college days and what little I learned there about 3D software, namely Maxons' Cinema 4D. It's a fickle and rage inducing program at the best of times and makes me want to pull my own teeth out with a set of pliers... and yet, I'm really quite enjoying it. The feeling of satisfaction when you figure out what you were doing wrong or understand a new tool is like a game in itself. I find myself burning hours and hours just moving little models about on a screen, it's almost like i'm 10 years old again playing with my toy tanks!


Anyway here's a few pieces I've come up with so far. I'm still pretty fresh to it, if you'll forgive the pun, so video is a little ways off yet but I'm getting better everyday and am really quite pleased with how these two turned out.

Caldari Mining Outpost
http://i.imgur.com/pJJQG.jpg

Dark Amarr Cathedral
http://i.imgur.com/uJv3m.jpg

More to come soon! Lemme know what you think!

First Post!

So i finally gave in and decided to get myself a blog. Normally I would scorn at such pretentious self exhibition but then I realised everyone likes to show off and needs some attention every now and then!

So here I am. Posting my first none-test entry and dipping my toe into the murky waters of talking about myself and what I'm doing on the Internet. That said, this and the next couple of posts will probably consist of a few of my older works since I will also be creating a sort of archive of my works on here for people to peruse at their leisure!

Without further ado I give you my first eve machinima I created called Reverie. 

I started work on this video a loooooong time before I finished it and went through several stages deleting everything I had done so far and just ignoring the project all together frequently falling in and out of love with it. I wanted to create a representation of many of the different aspects of eve (mining, wormholes, missions,fleets etc.) and how beautiful each of them look. Although I couldn't possibly have shown every aspect of the game I am happy with the final outcome and think it makes for a nice relaxing watch/good way to kill 5 minutes.

Enjoy the vid and be sure to leave some feedback!