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Originally posted by Divals the Conqueror:
**The beam is for the picture that shows when you click on the info thing.
Divals
**
Tube lights with glows are great. In Infini-D, they are the easiest way to make beams, and they look pretty good. The inner and outer colors can be different, producing a nice effect.
(example)
There are other methods, but they are pretty complicated.
As for rendering for Nova, set the camera 45° above and behind the ship - ie. the same distance up and back. Set up your lighting scheme of choice, or try to match Nova's - pipeline posted the scheme somewhere on the boards, I think. Make any glowing parts of the ship's texture that you want to appear as either lights or engine flames not glow. Spin and render your ship without glows or flames or anything. Then, apply a completely glowing white material to your ship. Render again - this is the mask, after you convert it to black and white (not greyscale) in an image editor. The "Threshhold" command in Photoshop works well.
Reload your ship, this time keeping one of either lights or flames. Apply a completely black material to your ship, unless you are doing lights and have some glowing parts on the ship that you want to appear as lights. Render. For a mask, you can just select all the black areas with a "magic wand" tool, like in Photoshop or AppleWorks (well, ClarisWorks had such a tool), since glows and flames are additive and don't really have any opacity like the ship base does.
Do again, make the ship black, and render with flames.
I usually render to either a PICS file or a QuickTime movie with no compression. Use W00tWare's tools to convert them into PICTs for use in Nova.
Stick them into a plugin, set up spďn or shän resources pointing to the PICT resources. Run the ResEdit file through W00tWare's EnRLE application. Copy the rlë8 and rlëD resources into your plugin, and edit the spďns and shäns to point to those resources instead of the PICTs.
A fast way to apply a texture to multiple objects in Infini-D is to select the base keyframe (assuming it's not animated) of all the objects you want to texture in the sequencer (command-4 is the shortcut to bring it up), and then apply the "Apply Surface At Keyframe" animation assistant, or whatever its name is. Pick your texture (eg. the glowing white mask surface) and all the objects whose keyframes you selected will have it applied to them. It's much faster than applying them one by one.
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(This message has been edited by Weepul 884 (edited 10-11-2003).)
