3D TUTORIAL
02-09-2001

LET THERE BE LIGHT A tutorial by his Majesty Myself Description I noticed the majority of you guys are blind ... no kidding, there is an awesome "bricks and mortar business plan" tutorials at this site that covers a lot but you gus are still pissing me off asking for "HOW THE HELL DO YOU DO YOUR LIGHTING SETUP, MASTER ?" ... Of course, you know i hate to reveal my tricks because the assholes that don't like me because i am so good are going to use them and claim them their own ... but hey, they are even more blind that you guys are so they may not even see that article .. so yeah i am going to repeat it all over again here ... AND , since i need you guys to understand it, i will use a StarTrek ships to show you it works with the most simple models :) In fact i have decided to use the good old never beaten ( a lot of people have tried, especially at the MCGI (Most Certainly Gay Inc.) place ) AMBASSADOR CLASS ...

TUTORIAL : in max or any other 3d proggy, the ambiant light doesn't cast shadows ... if you look in the real world, you will notice that ambiant light casts soft shadows , with that method of mine, i have tried to reproduce that and believe me it is really worth doing it .. so basically we are going to replace the ambiant light by a sphere of free spotlights , casting shadows and of very low intensity ( to prevent saturation and to have soft shadows ) so to do that, first add a free spot in the front view, and arrange for the scene to be included on the cone .. if it is not, rescale the scene and go to Hierarchy/reset scale right after ( with the scene selected of course ) right now select the spot , and move its pivot center in (x y z)(0 0 0) now select the top view, grab the array tool, select the 'rotate' arrow, in the Z axis enter 360, click on "instance" and the number of instances should be 16 you should have a ring of spots now .. select all the spots buyt the ones in front and behind the object ( u should have 14 selected ), go to the front view, grab the array tool , enter 180 in the rotation, 8 instances and there you go, you have a sphere of spots now .... intensity should be 0.03, casting shadow maps that have a size of 512 the colour should be blueish for example .... If you are still in the modeling process you can have 0.3 or 0.5 as intensity ... with this setup you will be able to set your materials the right way as they will look close to what they should look in reality ... Now for a scene, add the sunlight, that is another spot, but sith an intensity of 1 or 1.5, contrast 80, softened edges 20 , casting raytraced shadows , this would be for a space scene or for a ground scene around mid day ... otherwise you can use shadow maps with a size of 1024 ... the colour should be yellowish .. So this is how it should look after you have carefully done what i just wrote, if it doesn't look like that, it means you're an ass and you can stop doing 3d coz you won't get better than you currenty are .. [figure 1] [figure 1] [figure 2] This is how it looks with the big spotlight highly contrasted, notice it is a bit too bright right now for our taste...BR> [figure 2] I lowered the ambiant light spots to a value of 0.02 and switched to the "Catmull Rom" Anti ALiasing Filter...notice that this already looks better than everything you have ever seen in any 3d community devoted to StarTrek Renderings .. [figure 3] [figure 3] [figure 4] Now since you are an original guy, you need to take a good camera angle instead of the usual crappy beauty shot that makes me go to the toilets each time i see it.. [figure 4] Grab your best background now and slap it behind the ship.. of course since i am a real master my background you see here has got a procedural nebula and a homemade starfield wraped around the environment so it can move when the camera moves..notice how this image already beats even the best pictures made by the best StarTrek artists that work at I.L.M :) .. [figure 5] [figure 5] [figure 6] My favorite part, add a general glow that will enhance the brightest parts of the ship, credits whern credit is due, i owe that trick to my good friend Jose Perez ( his site is at http://www.fxstation.com ) .. [figure 6] Of course you can stop right here if you want, with that you will already be a huuuuge respected god among the startrek rendering morons you can find at MCGI, B5MG, 3DGladiators and even Scifi-Meshes ( we had them at Scifi-Art too you know ), but hey go further and add a bit of motion blur to the background and people will die at your feet :) .. [figure 7] [figure 7] My conclusion, if i ever see another supershitty StarTrek beauty shot after that i am going to personnaly execute the guy that made the image.. Thank you for your attention.