Software

BetterSpace

By: Alexander Shareef

BetterSpace

By: Alexander Shareef

BetterSpace

By: Alexander Shareef

BetterSpace

In the previous lesson we looked at lighting organic-based ships: those with lots of curved surfaces rather than those with angular, flat panels.

All my beta-buddies (Fabio, Craig Clark etc.) have told me that this lesson is uneccessary, following the previous lighting lesson, so I will compromise and make this a short one.

Betterspace was a series of tutorials that originally appeared on the site ap3d.com. Unfortunately they disappeared from the Net sometime in the last 5 years. What is presented here are the tutorials that I was able to resurrect thanks to a program called Warrick that is able to use sites like the Wayback machine and the Google cache.

BetterSpace

The final touch, and the one that is most often done badly in CG space scenes, is adding decent lighting to the scene. All the hard work you've put into building and texturing your objects will be a complete waste of effort if your lighting sucks.

BetterSpace

BetterSpace

So far we have used our the detail panel image that we created in the last lesson to apply a fairly generic texture to some of our object. While this technique is fine for smaller areas, larger and more prominent areas need to have texture maps specially painted for them, in order that the texture accentuates the detail that is already there.

BetterSpace

(front / perspective view) Layer 1

BetterSpace

So now we have built a fairly decent object with lots of surface detail, but there are still large areas of pristine flat colour, and we need to break these up a bit.