New Age Space Superiority Fighter Manta_4
Amabilis Forum: Model Feedback: New Age Space Superiority Fighter Manta_4
andnbsp; By Les on Friday, April 20, 2001 – 10:03 am: andnbsp;
This is a picture of the semi-finished final version of the Manta fighter. All thats left to do is texturing and engine glow/thrust. Comments anyone?
andnbsp; By Alex Grigny de Castro on Friday, April 20, 2001 – 10:06 am: andnbsp;
Looks great ! How do you curve the wings? I’ve been trying to do that without much success…
andnbsp; By Les on Friday, April 20, 2001 – 11:06 am: andnbsp;
Alex,
I used a sphere, then scaled it to the flattened state. Then I used the Bend operation, first to get the andquot;Gullandquot; wing look, and finally used the Bend operation again to sweep the wings backwards slightly. After doing the Gullwing, I rotated the wings until I could sweep them back.
I hope this helps you.
andnbsp; By Alex Grigny de Castro on Friday, April 20, 2001 – 11:32 am: andnbsp;
Thanks. I’ve tried to use the Bend operation, but I guess I haven’t got it right there.
andnbsp; By Les on Friday, April 20, 2001 – 12:08 pm: andnbsp;
Alex,
I’ve found that with certain objects, the bend operation doesn’t work the same on all faces of the object. I didn’t have any problems with the sphere, or torus, but with cubes, and cylinders, I usually have to rotate the object until I get the proper face into the proper position before it will do a bend like this. Sometimes, no matter how I rotate the object, it only seems to make the object lean to one side or the other.
Could this be the problem you are having?
andnbsp; By Les on Friday, April 20, 2001 – 03:42 pm: andnbsp;
YEEEEEHAAAAAWWWWWWW!!!!!!!
Well I finally got the cockpit canopy to appear transparent. Thanks a million to Dave Bollinger for his tutorial about aircraft canopies. Here is another picture with the canopy in place.
andnbsp; By Alex Grigny de Castro on Friday, April 20, 2001 – 04:51 pm: andnbsp;
Well I will have to experiment andnbsp;I noticed that if I make *part* of an object transparent, the 3DC renderer freaks out and all the object on screen is rendered transparent like. But i I split my object and make one of them transparent, then all goes well.
andnbsp; By Richard Borsheim (Richard_Borsheim) on Friday, April 20, 2001 – 08:58 pm: andnbsp;
Hi all,
All the Bend operation does is move points around. If you only have 8 points, like with a cube, all it will do is lean. The same goes for a cylinder. What you really need is an object with an even distribution of points like a sphere or a torus. If you increase the resolution of a sphere or the # of lines of latitutde for a cylinder you will get better bending.
Some video cards/drivers don’t seem to like partially transparent objects. I don’t know why exactly, but they don’t.
Richard
Amabilis Software
andnbsp; By Les on Saturday, April 21, 2001 – 11:46 am: andnbsp;
Richard,
I understand about the video card thing. I have the S3 Savage 4 card and chipset, and while it does great with most graphics, there are some things that it doesn’t seem to like. I haven’t had any trouble with glass or other transparent objects, but it does get a little crazy sometimes with edges of an object.
Also, I intended to mention with the second posting of the picture, that I have not exported any part of this model to MegaPov yet. MegaPov and I really don’t get along very well, because of having to write the code, which I’m no good at.
andnbsp; By Les on Saturday, April 21, 2001 – 11:56 am: andnbsp;
Alex,
I haven’t tried rendering just part of an object to be transparent, but I believe that it would have to be split, as you said, or have some other type of separation for the renderer to distinguish between the two.
About bending. If you are using a cube or cylinder, have you tried extruding one or more of the faces, then deforming them to approximate a bend? After smoothing, you may get close to what you are looking for.
I’ve played around with that a little, and it doesn’t look too bad.
andnbsp; By Alex Grigny de Castro on Saturday, April 21, 2001 – 08:53 pm: andnbsp;
Well the problem, Les, is simply that bend was not available… the handles were not on screen and selectable… it is probably a video card issue.
andnbsp; By Les on Saturday, April 21, 2001 – 08:59 pm: andnbsp;
Alex,
Wow, sorry to hear that. Hope you can get it worked out soon. I know the kind of problems that video cards can create.
Les
andnbsp; By Gareth on Tuesday, April 24, 2001 – 02:25 am: andnbsp;
I have found that the transparency problem can be corrected (at least on my computer) by switching from smooth to regular views or vice versa. In other words, the program just has to redraw the screen, and the partial transparency objects will be correctly rendered. It will stay correct until no object is selected (the background is clicked), at which point it will revert to mis-drawing the whole object with the transparent texture. I may be wrong, but this makes me think it’s a bug in the program, since my video card (an Nvida GeForce2 MX) can clearly draw the scene correctly, partial transparency objects and all. These days, I just try my hardest not to click on the background.
andnbsp; By Alex Grigny de Castro on Tuesday, April 24, 2001 – 04:06 am: andnbsp;
Yes, I agree, this is exactly what happens to me. I have a Matrox Millenium G400 Max agp 32Mb. The actual materials definition of the non transparent faces does not change… it’s a problem with the renderer.
andnbsp; By Richard Borsheim (Richard_Borsheim) on Tuesday, April 24, 2001 – 09:01 pm: andnbsp;
Hi,
Thanks for the info. Knowing that switching from smooth rendering to flat and back corrects it is quite useful. That might help me create a work-around for the bug in the renderer.
Richard
Amabilis Software
andnbsp; By Gareth on Saturday, April 28, 2001 – 09:57 pm: andnbsp;
Hello — just a note to say that the partial transparency problem is much more difficult to get around in the new Beta of v4.0, only because of the automatic ‘hover’ selection feature. With the earlier versions, one could avoid clicking on the background, which set off the apparent bug, but now it’s nearly impossible not to set it off by passing the cursor any background area. So I find myself hitting the smooth/unsmooth every few seconds now. I actually love the hover-selection feature, particularly when painting individual faces, but I thought you’d want to know about this side-effect.
andnbsp; By Richard Borsheim (Richard_Borsheim) on Saturday, April 28, 2001 – 10:16 pm: andnbsp;
Hi,
Thanks, I am looking at this for Beta 2. No luck yet though. But I’ll keep looking.
Richard
Amabilis Software