QUOTE (krugeruwsp @ Jul 10 2010, 01:30 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Dang, Jaca stole my thunder on the Mythbusters stuff. Basically, it would cost more money to fake going into space than it would to actually go there. The final nail in the coffin is the prismatic reflectors. If you took a high powered laser and a CCD detector, you could find the landing site and confirm it for yourself.

OR YOU COULD TOTALLY GO THERE AND SEE THE STUFF YOURSELF!

Oh wait, Nasa's funding got cut, never mind guys, spoke too soon.

QUOTE (EKHawkman @ Jul 10 2010, 11:06 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

The Pariah are kinda like the reavers from firefly, or to me they sound similar. Also, I'd been away for a few weeks and there was lots to catch up on, amazing ships delphi! Beautiful! Although, can I make a request for the enclave ships that you put an arrow as to which way they go, they look like they could go forward or backward.....
Lots of interesting developments, tons of cool ships, I think I'm going to have to create a ship, I really will. This will be tough!

I guess you could compare them to the Reavers in some regards. However, they really are a different can of worms altogether. For one, they don't paint the hulls of their ships with the blood of their victims. They actually run extremely organized vessels and government, with strict religious rules of conduct and harsh penalties for enforcement. They believe they are the most enlightened people in the galaxy, and that they are justified in sacrificing the blood of other civilizations because such heathen are deemed lesser and unclean. Thus, disobeying an order from a superior officer will not result in the offender being sacrificed or even killed, but instead they'll likely suffer unimaginable torture in the name of "purity" and "cleansing", such as administered flogging over the course of weeks or complete bodily mutilation with chemical agents. They are more about subservience than murder, surprisingly. They don't kill more "cattle" than they have to in pleasing their gods (in their opinion, at least), and they actually value the lives of their own people, believing that survival through hardship purifies the soul and makes one closer to enlightenment. A model Pariah citizen has endured all manner of unbelievable physical and emotional torture, and yet still pledges his/her allegiance to the cause. One of their earlier "prophets" had almost the entirety of his skin seared off during a planetary nuclear bombardment, survived off of anti-radiation treatments in an smashed bunker for a week, and tended to his own wounds before emerging again and contacting the Pariah fleet by his own means. Upon his return, he had to have both his legs and his right arm amputated, and spent the rest of his natural life attached to life-support machines that pumped his blood for him and prevented the radiation damage throughout his body from liquifying his organs. Despite all this hardship, he still believed in the Pariah faith and even used what years he had left to write one of the many tomes they now revere as gospel.

Imagine the Spanish Inquisition run amok, and with the notion that pain proves purity, as opposed to death doing the same.

QUOTE (EKHawkman @ Jul 10 2010, 12:47 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

OR YOU COULD TOTALLY GO THERE AND SEE THE STUFF YOURSELF!

Oh wait, Nasa's funding got cut, never mind guys, spoke too soon.

In 2015, the Orion spacecraft is supposed to come into action, running more efficient cargo deliveries to the ISS. The ultimate goal is a second wave of moon landings by 2020. Following that they hope to establish a permanent living and refueling station on Luna from which to begin the manned journey to Mars.

This post has been edited by Delphi : 11 July 2010 - 05:38 AM

They also want to build a new ship to replace the Space Shuttle. EKHawkman is correct in this case, NASA isn't getting the funding to do all of what it wants to do.

QUOTE (DarthKev @ Jul 11 2010, 05:45 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

They also want to build a new ship to replace the Space Shuttle. EKHawkman is correct in this case, NASA isn't getting the funding to do all of what it wants to do.

To date, the "War on Terror" (Afghanistan and Iraq combined) has cost the USA approximately $1,015,700,000,000.

The entire Apollo Program cost the USA approximately 25 billion dollars, in 1969. With inflation calculated, the same mission today would cost roughly 152 billion dollars. To sum it up, the Apollo Program involved the launch of at least 17 space capsules, five of which were manned and landed on the moon.

That means that if the money being poured like water into Iraq and Afghanistan had been put toward NASA instead, we could have afforded six repeats of the Apollo Program, meaning we could have visited the moon at least 30 times between 2001 and 2010 (assuming the given five landings per program). Even if you factor in making it really comfortable for the astronauts, and doubling the expenditure for absolutely top-of-the-line technology and manufacturing, we could have afforded at least fifteen extremely well-equipped trips.

Instead, we're looking at just barely scraping together enough to go back - with almost the same technology - a single time by the year 2020.

I don't hate the USA. I love what it stands for, and I love (most of) the people that inhabit it. Its government and the intellect thereof baffles and terrifies me.

We could have easily put not only people, but a full-fledged base on Mars. We could have already seen hundreds of astronauts exploring a vast alien desert on foot with scientific instrumentation in hand. Instead, GIs storm foreign dunes, carrying tools manufactured for the express purpose of wholesale murder. Isn't humanity wonderful?

Anyway, that's my rant.

This post has been edited by Delphi : 11 July 2010 - 07:57 AM

It is something that really really bothers me. I'm not a fan of the way Nasa has been handled by the Government now. It was all, "We made it too the moon guys, what now?" And then almost nothing more.
And the war, the war we are not treating it like a war. We haven't switched to war time economy, despite this being one of the longest wars Modern America has faced. If we had put up wartime everything, people wouldn't have supported the war, and we probably would have gotten out of there a long time ago.
Either way, these are the mistakes our government has made, let us just hope they don't make the mistakes of the NDC.

Also, both the reavers and pariah are absolutely terrifying. I would hate to meet either without a ridiculously armed ship.

Right there with you, Delphi. But, didn't they just abandon the Orion program a few weeks ago? I thought I read something about that. I'm still rather irritated that they ditched the next gen space shuttle. There were two working prototypes, and then they inexplicably decided to go with an unreusable spacecraft that is essentially a large Apollo capsule with better computers. Makes no sense to me.

What happened was Obama declared that we would skip going to the moon entirely and would instead land on an asteroid, and then Mars directly. That's 10 times harder than what our previous plan was and throws a monkey wrench into the past decade of NASA's research entirely.

Also, was C'tekk Mu the Magnificent the starter of the Pariah cult?

QUOTE (Aben Zin @ Apr 23 2006, 11:31 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

July 22nd, 2008: Turns out he's the incarnation of the Great God C'tekk Mu the Magnificant, and is worshipped by over 3000 devotees, who hold secret moonlit rituals in his name.
By October of 2010 the senior members of his ever growing cult (some of the most powerful and influential people in America) have ownership of approx 76% of the state of Indiana- which, via several suspiciously speedy ammendments to the Constitution, has been renamed Sh'teth K'rel C'tekk Mu (lit. Sacred and most Holy land of the Divine God), and is seeking independence from the United States.
April 23rd, 2011: The US military finally break the siege of the Great Temple of C'tekk Mu, a virtually impenaterable fortress defended by Eji1700's most fanatical devotees. In the end the Military had to deploy an experimental sonic weapon, which shattered the metres thick fortified plas-steel outer wall.
On penetrating the inner sanctum US Black Ops are confronted with the sight of a great catherdral decorates with wall hanging made from the flayed flesh of Cult worshipers. Atop a central alter a withered husk hangs crucified upon a black marble pentrgram- kept alive in only a horrific half-life by a series of organic and mechanical tubes which feed him with a constant supply of black fluid, pumped from the alter itself.
As several of the Black Ops team bring up their lunch their senior officer approachs the alter with it's encumbant "God". Cautiously reaching for the thermite charges on his belt he glances up to see the cadaver's eyelids flicker. It seems to focus on the man, it's eyelids heavy and the eyes beneath white and blind. A damp rattling filled the room, amplified by hidden speakers placed throughout the entire temple, as though the thing were trying to draw breath through long dead lungs.
It whispers something, the amplified to fill the entire room, it's speech hesitant and rasping.
"...Kill... me..."
Shaking his head, and surpressing a shudder only through many years of training, the Black Ops Captain raised his weapon and squeezed the trigger.

Az

QUOTE (EKHawkman @ Jul 11 2010, 01:26 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

It is something that really really bothers me. I'm not a fan of the way Nasa has been handled by the Government now. It was all, "We made it too the moon guys, what now?" And then almost nothing more.
And the war, the war we are not treating it like a war...

From what I've read recently, it's both not economically feasable to go building bases on other planets and politically difficult. To get the funding together takes time, and every 4 or 8 years there is a major policy/funding change that completely destroys NASA's planning. And, according to the aforementioned Atomic Rocket site, while cool, there's probably nothing worth the cost of being in space out there for us to find/use/get. Or at least, not worth the cost of setting up permanent bases on other planetary bodies (Sadly).

And as for the war, besides not be treated as a real war, it's not being fought like a real war. Our troops are bound by all sorts of ludicrous restrictions, I had an Air Force guy over here the other day telling me how they couldn't fire unless fired upon, even if the people were waving guns and screaming about their hatred of Americans from right up in their faces. They also had a stealth-night-convoy all set up, and then were handed glowing, reflective bands to wear in case "someone got hurt." Needless to say, their now glowing ex-blacked-out convoy got shot up.

But back to the task at hand, I knew that the ships were rendered in 5 or 10 degree increments, but what I don't know is how I'd go about setting up a sketchup file, for instance, to render the ships straight out of my sketchup file (since I can in fact render inside of sketchup ). I'd need to know the exact camera angle off the blue axis. Another issue I've had in the past is getting ships centered so they rotate correctly when not rendered straight top-down. For some reason, they drift around. I'd also need to know specifically which date and time to set the sun to at a specific location to get it pointed the right way, though I don't know if anyone's figured that out.

I've used Blender and Mechanisto to render before, and am hoping to use the (much easier) interface inside Sketchup to do it now. Though the whole 'perspective-angled-render' thing throws me off...

And yes, my avatar is from Marathon Infinity. I've been a fan of Bungie since MI came out however long ago, and I've used that image as my avatar for a long time; I don't think anyone has ever figured it out. Good eye.

QUOTE (Meaker VI @ Jul 12 2010, 07:23 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

And as for the war, besides not be treated as a real war, it's not being fought like a real war. Our troops are bound by all sorts of ludicrous restrictions, I had an Air Force guy over here the other day telling me how they couldn't fire unless fired upon, even if the people were waving guns and screaming about their hatred of Americans from right up in their faces.

That's because of a tragic accident where the was a fighter-bomber strike on a wedding, due to the habit of firing rifles in the air at important events. It's a good restriction, because who the hell wants to bomb civvies?

QUOTE (Templar98921 @ Jul 12 2010, 01:38 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

That's because of a tragic accident where the was a fighter-bomber strike on a wedding, due to the habit of firing rifles in the air at important events. It's a good restriction, because who the hell wants to bomb civvies?

Well, they aren't treating it like a war either. This is a new type of war, and we aren't fighting it efficiently. This is half an actual war, and half a PR war. And we aren't winning either.

Define the term "PR war". Are we trying to make friends with the Middle Eastern governments while forcing them to cough out all the terrorists they still have in their midst? That's like trying to sooth a beehive full of really ticked off bees while still reaching in to grab the honeycombs. Neither will end well.

Ah ha! Found my answers:

Quote from Pipeline:

QUOTE

Main light: Pure white, 100% brightness -- located at (if looking at ship from Nova perspective going up the screen):

• X = 100 (left 100 units)
• Y = 100 (up 100 units)
• Z = 100 (forward 100 units)

In other words, top-left corner of screen.

You should also turn off any ambient lighting, and add a fill light (pure white, 20-25% brightness) at X = -100 (right 100), Y = 50 (up 50), Z = 0.

All lights should be targeted at the ship (the middle of the scene, coordinates 0, 0, 0)

best always,

Dave @ ATMOS

And, from Modesty Blaise:

QUOTE

In 3Ds max you need to set a camera which looks at the ship from a 45� angle. The ship needs to have it's back towards the camera at the first frame. In the next frames the ship rotates clockwise.

I'll see if I can get that to work on one of the ships I've made out of sketchup sometime soonish.

(EDIT) Great Success! I've just finished setting up and testing a (complicated) sketchup file that does several things.

First, it has 36 'scenes' (sketchup cameras), each viewing 10 degrees different, as in NOVA and all EV games.
Second, it has 72 lights (one pair per scene) which, hopefully, are setup correctly for use in NOVA. I'm not positive I've gotten it right- the sketchup renderer I use (twilight) isn't geared the same and lights are measured in different units than the instructions indicate above. Still, I think it looks good, whether or not it's 100% accurate.
Third, the renderer is set up such that it will batch-render each camera in sequence, giving me the total 36 scenes necessary to make a simple NOVA render. It doesn't export to movie formats, so I've got 36 .jpgs, but whatever. I'm sure someone good at script-writing could fix that.

Now, what is amazing about this file is that it manipulates the camera and the lights, NOT the model, meaning you don't need to do anything other than place your ship's center on the origin, scale it appropriately, and click "render." You don't, and won't, need complicated spin-transformation, animation, or manual-movement of the model to render it.

I'll post the whole spin-style image once it's finished.

Not fully pleased with the lighting, but since the 2 lights are a component and each light is a component, I can change them pretty easily.

This post has been edited by Meaker VI : 12 July 2010 - 05:41 PM

Your spot light needs to be way brighter than the fill light, me thinks.

Nevertheless it looks awesome! Definitely an "IDA Frigate remastered."

Yeah, I figured out what's going on with the lighting. Somehow my lights aren't animating properly, and so the batch render is only using the first light for every camera. What happens is that the ship looks like it's rotating, but the light is remaining stationary relative to the ship, so it looks weird. I'm working on finding a solution.

Also, on that render, I used lights with decay, I've since turned off the decay and that fixed things up substantially.

EDIT: Fixed the issue.

I've also setup a mask-material, which, when applied, makes the entire ship show up white. Other than tiling the images, which I need to do manually (until I find a PC-tiling application or get my mac back online) the entire process for rendering this image took 7 minutes @ 128px resolution (for possible LASIK down to 68px in Photoshop), from bringing the model into the scene to having 72 images, ready to combine into sprite and mask images.

Attached is the .zip sketchup file. I encourage anyone to use it, however you will require Twilight renderer to make it work (Found here). Sadly, Twilight only works on Windows or in a Windows box right now, I think they're working on a conversion but any of the newer Macs should have the ability to box windows included. If you do use this file, please mention me somewhere in some credits. Let me know here if you think the lighting needs additional work.

Attached File(s)

• RenderSetup.zip (27.26K)
  Number of downloads: 9

This post has been edited by Meaker VI : 13 July 2010 - 11:22 AM

Oooh, pretty! From the back it looks like a Fed Destroyer, really really cool!

Nice, but I'm still busy trying to figure out how to render my own designs. I think I'm going to have to go download a trial version of Sketchup Pro so I can export them into 3Ds or something for use in Blender.

... unless you have some ideas for a Sketchup 7 (not Pro) user stuck with using Blender as a rendering tool, Meaker. And I say "stuck with using Blender" because I'm not finding it to be as powerful as I've heard it is. Not to mention it seems buggy. I can't even get its texturing tools to work without crashing!

QUOTE (DarthKev @ Jul 13 2010, 09:55 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Nice, but I'm still busy trying to figure out how to render my own designs. I think I'm going to have to go download a trial version of Sketchup Pro so I can export them into 3Ds or something for use in Blender.

... unless you have some ideas for a Sketchup 7 (not Pro) user stuck with using Blender as a rendering tool, Meaker. And I say "stuck with using Blender" because I'm not finding it to be as powerful as I've heard it is. Not to mention it seems buggy. I can't even get its texturing tools to work without crashing!

Well, I've done it before, but it was tricky and I'd need to examine one of my old files or dink around in it for a few hours to figure it out again. I also used to model and render straight in blender, and some of the modeling was way easier to do naitively, but I like the sketchup workflow better. You usually don't actually need sketchup pro unless you actually are a professional, it will export some nice files, but you can translate the files it already exports easy enough to not spend $500. I don't think there is any format you can't create using just free sketchup and blender, if you re-export out of blender.

Texturing was actually pretty easy in Blender, you can UV map from projections if you know what you're doing and that was great. I can't do that in sketchup, and usually just texture by face (or in this case, my models are 99% untextured and I 'texture' by actual model detailing).

But, what I would recommend is taking a look at my file, and then download the Twilight demo if you've got a PC. It makes it so that you don't need to do anything once you've got your model finished, and is a dream come true for me. If you don't have a PC, take a look at it and see if there are any renderers for Mac that you like (I'm still not sure if Twilight is being translated or not, but it uses another renderer, Kerkythea, as it's base and that is open-source), and then see if you can do what I did in that renderer. If you do have a PC, twilight is not as expensive as Sketchup pro and is well-worth whatever they're charging for anyone who wants to render their sketchup output.

You can actually get pretty decent (probably passable) results by playing with the sketchup shadow settings and styles. Turn off lines, turn on shadows, get them coming from the top left. My file doesn't do that, though you could probably make it do something similar. Look around at Sketchucation and see if there is anything you like, lots of people use Sketchup for modeling many things, and all have different approaches to rendering, from using an external renderer to printing an image and finishing it by hand.

Edit: Right, forgot, you can also run Twilight on a windows box inside of Mac if you've got a newer machine (last 4 years?). That would, very likely, be worth your time. I cannot express enough how easy of a renderer Twilight is compared to most other rendering programs. It is the Sketchup of the Rendering world, and it works within Sketchup!

This post has been edited by Meaker VI : 13 July 2010 - 05:03 PM

If you're having trouble understanding Blender, I highly recommend picking up either Blender: Noob to Pro off Amazon, or the free Blender Basics book from here. I've never had an issue with Blender's texture tool. Are you using 2.49b, or the alpha release of 2.5?

I've got 2.49b. Is that a bad thing?