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Speculative Traders

Hi !

Andrew, perhaps we could organize the jump sequence work and concentrate on different visualisation types ?
Which types are You thinking of ?
Right now I consider the jump grid version and another one just forming a roughly ship shaped field with random coloring and glowing.

Regrading the texturing issue its really nice to do something different from time to time.
Here I have to admit, that I maybe have to use a different approach, as the texturing I use now consumes VERY much time during rendering, thus making the production of an animation sequence quite a pain.
Crow, any good hint on that ?

Best regards,

Mert
 
"Right now I consider the jump grid version"

Same here. I've not got very far.

"Here I have to admit, that I maybe have to use a different approach, as the texturing I use now consumes VERY much time during rendering"

Rendering at a lower resolution can help a lot. Use fewer lights if you can. Smaller textures might help. You can cut a lot of corners with animations.
 
Hi folks !

I started fighting with the glow post effect in my 3D program and hope to succeed soon.
Heres another shot:

LJumpHullGrid4.jpg


Regarding the texturing its true, that I am satisfied with the basic setup, i.e. a basic bump map, a color scheme and a specularity map.
I will go on in detailing these textures as this will not make rendering time worse than it is already


Now, the animation thing.
Sadly my program is not able to produce DivX AVIs directly but just plain uncompressed files (a bit too large even for my webspace), so could anybody tell me if there is a free converter ?
Anyway Andrew gave a good hint with the resolution and rendering quality. Its really possible to decrease quality for those animations.

Regards,

Mert
 
Hmm... just a thought here...

start the jump sequence with all the lines as faint, thin blue, then crank up their luminescence until they eclipse the ship into a glowing source. then switch to just a glowing ship model in the same color/intensity, then fade by using transparency & reduced light output until its completely gone...

and the nitpick: grids are not supposed to be more than 1.5m apart... (SSOM) as the grid also is what keeps J-Space outside the hull... and the curve on Jspace is apparently on a 0.75-1 m radius... (I've had fun as a GM with the potential effects of that... a hollowed out hull except for the last 1m from the hull grid...)
 
Originally posted by Aramis:
and the nitpick: grids are not supposed to be more than 1.5m apart... (SSOM) as the grid also is what keeps J-Space outside the hull... and the curve on Jspace is apparently on a 0.75-1 m radius... (I've had fun as a GM with the potential effects of that... a hollowed out hull except for the last 1m from the hull grid...)
Click to expand...
Urgggh ... I don't know that I'd both going that far. I'd be happy with the ship being non-canonical in that sense. :D
 
Originally posted by Andrew Boulton:
http://www.virtualdub.org/
Click to expand...
Just a note here that virtualdub is an excellent program, esp. for the price. You will need any codecs desired installed first (in this case DivX, links are in this previous post).

Generally DivX produces a smaller filesize but MPEG-4 makes a nicer looking file. http://www.videohelp.com/ is a good resource site.

General note in case you find the program handy: it will not work with or create any of the Microsoft proprietary formats, like ASF or WMV, but it will handle MS's version of MPEG 4, which is a nice codec. There is a mpeg-2 version of the program here (link). I find them both useful but you don’t need the second program to create DivX files. FWIW, the author of that program also has a nice AC-3 (Dolby Digital) audio decompressor, which comes in handy when working with surround sound. Yes adding surround sound of a ship entering j-space would be great! :cool:

Oh and great work in this thread!

HTH,

Casey
 
I must say I'm not keen on the 'raised' look of the grid lines. I looks like someone's squeezed out lines of icing sugar over the ship :eek:
 
Andrew - that's more like how I imagined it, and I think that looks better too. Though you need to cover the cylindrical engine bits too
 
Originally posted by Andrew Boulton:
I suppose I'm going to have to add this to the movie now...along with sounds...
Click to expand...
Why? You can't hear anything in space...
 
Hi !

Mal, just watch the coming animation.
Expanding icing sugar looks quite well (very cinematic)
...

Andrew, could You try to distribute the grid more evenly and throw some dirt on it, so that it doesnt look so perfect ?
Anyway, thanks alot for these hint about DivX and VirtualDub.

Regards,

Mert
 
Originally posted by Andrew Boulton:
"Why? You can't hear anything in space..."

Reality vs coolness.
Click to expand...
<waving hands> 'cos they recorded the engine sound from the jumping ship and added it later to the video from an external camera yeah that's it- </waving hands> ; oh and what he said, it's cool. :cool: One can always hit the mute button. ^_^

Heck I bought Star Wars Episode II mainly for the whole Sonic Torpedo attack scene in surround sound even though I have to chuck my brain out the window each time I watch it.
<boom BWAAAAAAAAAN slice asteroid!>

Casey looking for caffeine
 
Hmmm. I wonder what space around a jumping ship would look like? I mean, you are about to extract one 'chunk' of that space (the ship plus a wee bit around it) from the normal universe. Nature abhors a vaccuum and would probably bend space to fill the missing bit. So, one would have to think the transition is "quick". You might have a long fancy run-up, but the actual jump would be instant and space would instantly 'fill in' (well, maybe not instantly to math-phys geeks, but instantly to human observation). This would mean one minute you have a nice glowing grid covered ship, next minute you have blank space. I doubt there would be an exo-energetic flash or bloom as you went out.

Now, thinking further on this, the hull is where the grid is setup and presumably the lines are laid along it. Are they a standard pattern (lanthanum grid, immobile) as one would think? If so, the lines are probably very regularized with hull forms, not looking like they were just laid overtop. They probably follow very clear patterns very cleary topogrophically mapped to the hull contours.

As they power up, in sections, first one section then another may become brighter. Eventually, just before jump, I envision the whole thing as being bright, but perhaps even then it is a patchwork as the ship is using different power levels in different places to setup the hyper entry vector right for a given destination. But at least some sections probably glow brightly enough to troulbe the eye.

And then, in a blink, maybe with some distortion, as you would expect if you took a glass jar of water and suddenly removed a liter from the middle and it had to fill in, the ship is just gone.

Sounds would be the hum of the the energies coursing through the jump grid. As the energies ramp up, it may more closely approximate the howl of a rapid wind or the whine of a high speed turbine than the hum of high tension lines. Then, silence. Yes, you would not hear the sound effects from space... but you could well hear them on the ship which has an atmosphere. Machinery is rarely whisper quiet.

Anyway, that's just my musings. The renders look good Mert/Andrews/etc.
 
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