OK,
For the plugin which I am doing I have tried numerous programs (free or shareware) to do the ships, all being designed at least in my head. I have tried assembling one of them in Mechanisto (as it came highly reccomended), but it seems to have no way to affect the thickness of hollow cylinders, leading to more than half the ship dissapearing when it is rendered (needless to say aside from it's other limitations!). Are there any solutions to this issue that don't begin with "Let's blow $999 for a program that I will only use to design EVN ships"? Help please!

Thanks,
Rik

------------------
Drinking causes hangovers.
I will uphold Ma'at.
Shemsu Hor.

In POV-Ray, you would use a difference{} block, put the original cylinder first, and put a smaller, longer cylinder (or shorter, if you want endcaps) in the second spot.

Mechanisto, though.......... gnah. Look for "boolean" operations. If there are none, you probably can't do it..........

Is POV-Ray the one where you don't actually draw anything? As in, it looks like a bunch of C code?

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Drinking causes hangovers.
I will uphold Ma'at.
Shemsu Hor.

Yeah, it is........... eheh.

Still, I find it more reliable than any program that makes its spheres out of mesh objects........ cough hack Mechanisto, SoftImage sneeze choke sputter

Quote

Originally posted by NTiOzymandias:
**Yeah, it is........... eheh.

Still, I find it more reliable than any program that makes its spheres out of mesh objects........ cough hack Mechanisto, SoftImage sneeze choke sputter**

coughchokecoughpovrayaddictcoughcoughchoke

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To make hollow "cylinders" in Mech, you'll actually need to insert a torus. Double click on the object in your object window to adjust the size. If half is disappearing, choose the object settings window and uncheck "remove back faces".

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Apparently, common sense isn't so common...
~Nick

Ahhhhh, thank you!

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Drinking causes hangovers.
I will uphold Ma'at.
Shemsu Hor.

OK, then how's this:

How do I get graphics onto the ship as opposed to being just a solid colour? I know that a pict or some other format can be used as an imagemap of sorts; but how do you get one to go on correctly if it is not a repeating, tiled image? Say like a stripe down the side or something like that.

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Drinking causes hangovers.
I will uphold Ma'at.
Shemsu Hor.

First, you need to make the image map in a paint program, such as Photoshop. Save it as a .pct. Then go to edit shaders in Mechanisto. Make a new shader and add a texture map. Choose your picture and click "ok". Now you should be in the shader attributes(or whatever the list is called) list for your shader with texture map selected. Under the list there will be left, right, front, back, top, and bottom all checked. Check only the face or faces that you want to shade with that texture map. A cube and rounded cube have 6 faces, a cylinder and rounded cylinder have three, a sphere has 1, a cone has two, and so on. Good luck.

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Apparently, common sense isn't so common...
~Nick

OK,
the main body of this shiplet thing is kind of a tube with a cone thing on the end (real original). What I am meaning specifically is how do I have to set up the picture (like what kind of templete if any, or dimensions, etc) so that it will be oriented correctly on the cylinder?

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Drinking causes hangovers.
I will uphold Ma'at.
Shemsu Hor.

(url="http://"http://squibix.net/mech-ev")http://squibix.net/mech-ev(/url) -- look at 'using mechanisto,' in the tutorials section; specifically 'texture maps.'

It's not just that I want to advertise, but I've done all that work! I'd hate for it all to go to waste.

(This message has been edited by Danny (edited 08-01-2002).)