(OT) Re: CGI FT starships

> At 03:05 PM 8/16/99 +0100, you wrote:

I would love to see a FT model site! I would donate my little Arapaho model.

For those, like me, who can't wait and have access to rendering software
here are some resources I have found handy as a cgi duffer/hack ;)
(even
if you don't you can get POV-Ray at http://www.povray.org/  It's a free
open source render engine. They have links to 3rd party modeling programs that
talk to eachother too).

I got the star background I used in my images at
http://samadhi.jpl.nasa.gov/ it was the 2.9 meg Tycho8.tif (They state
that
anything NOT specificaly marked "JPL/Caltech" requires no permission to
use). I thought it was nice because it wasn't just a bunch of white dots. Thre
is a bunch of spherical maps of planets and moons in the solar system as well
which are NICE.

For DIY planitary maps I cant recommend Wilbur enough. Go to
http://www.ridgecrest.ca.us/~jslayton/software.html and get it.  It
provides output that can be used as heightfields or for grid-mapping
your favorite colony world. Did I mention you should go get it?

And there are a metric long ton displacement butt-load of starship model
sites out there. Unfortunatly (in my opinion) the ship model selection tends
to closely follow the current popular TV SF programs. But if you are
interested in doing your own you should try to find some that include bump and
texture maps in the download and look at how they were made then back engineer
your own.

And if anyone is worried about model compatibility there is always Crossroads
a Windows freeware application that can translate between several 3D file
formats.

Sorry if I rambled on there. I hope that it wasn't too OT.

Lurking,

Quoting Ndege Diamond (Mon, Aug 16, 1999 at 10:22:07PM -0700)
> For those, like me, who can't wait and have access to rendering
(even
> if you don't you can get POV-Ray at http://www.povray.org/ It's a

For those of you who do want to play with povray, there are some people who
have created 'galaxy effects' and 'lens effects' in publicly available include
files. I use them myself for background on space images rather than using
downloaded image files.

  To get a little more on-topic, a question for Jon - what sort of
images do you want? Battle scenes, patrol scenes, single ships, ships from the
fleet book, our own designs?

  :)

  Cheers

[...]
> Sorry if I rambled on there. I hope that it wasn't too OT.

Ndege, you've been posting too much lately. You officially lose 'Lurking'
status for this week.

;-)

Mk

> Quoting Ndege Diamond (Mon, Aug 16, 1999 at 10:22:07PM -0700)
(even
> if you don't you can get POV-Ray at http://www.povray.org/ It's a

Any/all of the above, though for purely commercial reasons we'd prefer
it to be illos of our own ship models.