Star Trek Stuff

[scifidude79]

Thanks Eric. I already fixed it, I just didn't share the render. (it's on my laptop) I just had to increase the luminosity of the lights and transmission distance of the dome. I also turned up the luminosity inside of my impulse engines.

[MadKoifish]

videos are a PITA to deal with vs a text website even a nfo file. and yes, all the telemetry crap should be disables activated or not, making a MS account is a load of BS as well. Like google forcing people to have a google+ account to comment or do anything on youtube and other services. Spamming your location and activities by default.

As for the light you could always make the domes transparent to the lum light. Just do not cast shadows and it should let the light through. Generally to get the spill you want you have to break reality some as we are used to a minature model and how light travels to it. Also making the surface reflective (not glossy) should alow more of it to LOOK like it is lighting up as most of what you would get is reflective light on the hull vs bounced or direct. Drawback of a reflective surface is render times.

[scifidude79]

I've had a Microsoft account for over a decade. It was a requirement of the XBOX 360 long before it was one for Windows.

I've been trying not to break reality, but it may indeed be necessary. I usually also add at  least a bit of illumination to my bussard domes, since they don't seem to behave the way the domes on the TV show model did. But, I also want to avoid overdoing it. The dome shouldn't look like a light source.

[MadKoifish]

If you scale your model to the 11 foot one with proper cd on the emissions mats it likely will spill. Scale of the scene effects the results. Max's "glow" or really emissive mats only has a cd m2 scale and kelvin temp range, the old LUM was just unknown units. Not sure what lw has likely has many more options. As mention of transmission distance etc. Max just FGs it through a photon particle system. So all ambient light no shadows etc.

The MS account thing is a trick to get you to populate a unused service like google+ know many who do not sign up but use the os. Personally W10 is not much better than mallware. The telemetry stuff though has infected 8 and 7 as well unless you block the "security" updates. heh, keylogger and botnet are security patches. . . . . . .

[scifidude79]

I build my models to scale with the fictional stats, not the filming miniatures. So, this is a 288.6m long model. I do this so I don't have to scale the models if I want multiple ones in a scene, they're already to scale. The problem with the light spill off was a simple matter of dorking around with settings. I start with lower settings and ramp them up so that I don't overdo things.

Copied from my blog:

These renders are ones I did for my own use, but there's no reason not to share them. I finally got the bussard collectors where I want them. That means I'll be moving on to other stuff. I'll definitely be working on this this weekend, but I have some other stuff planned too. One thing I have planned is to put Windows on my main computer. This laptop works OK, but it's somewhat limited due to the age and power of the processor. I've had the whole thing lock up on me more than once using Modeler, resulting in me having to do a hard reboot and lose work. Plus, it's not the speediest thing for rendering. But, it's still not a bad computer.

[scifieric]

Beautiful work, Chris!  The paneling is subtle, but there.  The reaction control thrusters are visible, but not in-your-face.  Nice.  Very nice.

[scifidude79]

Thanks Eric.

[Prime_8]

like the blue back light . look cool man .


I have to spend a hour or so and  clean up my lap top .  gonna be no main power ta work for next 3 days , so i may need my lappy for some coding or something. it badly need a SSD  . it would feel  3 or 4 times faster if i migrated it to ssd. I should get one of those DVD/CDrom  tray swap-out  to SSD  for it .

[scifidude79]

Thanks Scott.

Yeah, I've heard SSDs are good for speeding things up, but none of my computers have them.

[Prime_8]

sd is a insan boost , slap in a sata ssd  ( do teh OS transfer first ) 

on older rigs especially laptops it's a huge boost.  they are actually tougher, better for stuff in motion.
never need a defrag .. ever and newer ones are quite durable.

you can even let widow page fill to them and because they are so fats that page file makes you who rig feel way faster.

if yo have a  USB adapter (some come with one ) to go form usb to the SATA on the drive you can use the disk cloaning tool  to move or clone you windows to teh new drive, swap out the old HDD and slip in the SD  and boot into glorious speed . and with 256GB drive like 20 and 30 bucks .  hell, it way worth it.

pu teh original drive in a usb to SATA enclosure and use it as an external backup, that you can also us eas an instant rescue disk by simply putting it back in as C: again . so when you buy one try to get one that is 2x teh capacity you will need, the more free space on an SSD the faster it is .
HDD  loge space  and slwo  , SSD not as much space , blisteringly fast.

[MadKoifish]

M.2 is better if you have the connection. Just make sure you avoid the slow 500mb r/w ones as I see those are more common now. 1500mbps vs 500 of a ssd. I have m.2 on the media pc and zoom zoom zoom, and it is bolted to the mobo so no cables wires etc. A lot of laptops offer this connector. Also using a standalone ssd for windows cache only speeds crap up too.

Suck is laptops usually do not have room for more than 1 of ether sata ssd or m.2 which sucks ad large storage is expensive 600usd for 4tb. but if your just looking for a boot drive 40usd for a 128mb 560/550mbps ssd, less if you trust those Chinese ones. lol (like 14usd) I used to run off a 60gig one os usually only occupies 28gig, 40 for a load of software. Just do not use a ssd for buttloads of read write and consider a boot ssd as a sacrifical drive for a life of say 2~4 yrs max. I have some over 8yrs old now and no issues low wear but I know those on vertex2 drives that died in 3yrs.

[scifidude79]

Things are starting to come to a head with me and Lightwave 2018 again. Now I remember one of the things I hate about it: trying to do TOS bussards. The above bussards still aren't to my liking. I was messing around with them this morning while waiting for a package to be delivered and I still don't like how they render, and how LW2018 renders in general. So, I'm getting pissed at this thing.

The package I was waiting for was a Windows 10 install stick. Fortunately, I went to the trouble of creating my own install flash drive, because the one they sent me is from 2017. But, that's OK, all I need is the product key. So, I'm going to install Windows 10 1903 tonight on my desktop, and I'm going to mess around with some alternatives for LW2018 on my laptop while it's installing. The two things I'm going to try include taking the ship back to Lightwave 10, where I know I can get the bussards looking how I want them, and also taking a look at what I can do with Blender. (Eric, Dean and others do fantastic looking bussards in Blender) If necessary to get it how I want it, I'll dump this whole LW file and rebuild the ship in Blender.

[scifieric]

(Eric, Dean and others do fantastic looking bussards in Blender) If necessary to get it how I want it, I'll dump this whole LW file and rebuild the ship in Blender.

Thank you, Chris!  That's a very nice compliment!

I hope you don't have to dump the whole thing.  Blender can import a bunch of file types.  If you do go to Blender, I'd be happy to try to help you with the model, if I can.

[scifidude79]

If I do the Enterprise in Blender, I'm going to follow your tutorial and just modify stuff where I want it to be different.

It's my experience that exporting and importing causes more headaches than a rebuild. A great example is the grid lines. I'd have to do something about the way Blender's "smooth" setting makes a mess of sharp edges. One way is, of course, the edge split modifier, but that literally makes a mess of geometry as it literally just splits the geometry, making a mess of joined together separate objects. The way I'm doing the paneling on the Heracles eliminates the need for this, but I don't want to go around and fix that after the fact. It's easier to do it as I go.

[Prime_8]

in 2.8 I have had some success smoothing particular selection. bu the only way I got it to make nice crisp edges nest smooth was to set edges to sharp or to add extra control edges.