Wow... great job!

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"The cold time brings dreams from the skies... they slip through my fingers, counting my wishes..."

utterly superb work, and yes, I am interested in all the nerdy technical details if you should be so generous as to post a tutorial or something like that. Of course, all in good time.

Truly awsome man, another great alternative future pic. They so remind me of some of my early science fiction books from E.E Doc Smith and his lensmen series.

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Machines were mice and men were lions once upon a time, but now that it's the opposite, it's twice upon a time. - Moondog

Most of the interesting technical stuff has to do with the terrain, and actually the best thing I could do on that one is to point you at a tutorial by Peter Asberg that I read early this year - [link] - which gave me a lot to think about, especially about using vertex colors as a mask, and about displacement mapping.

The only thing I added to that was first, using the excellent Ground Crew procedural textures on the terrain - in displacement and the other channels - and I also did a trick with generating the vertex colors I wanted to use as a mask for teh terrain textures. Notice how there's one sort of sandy, dusty surface on the horizontal bits of terrian, and then the rocky cliff face texture on the more vertical bits; then they blend together on inclines. I set that up by placing a light above the terrain model and baking that lighting into the vertex colors. The light lit the flat surfaces, but not the vertical ones, and that gave me a pretty great vertex color mask that I only needed to tweak slightly to get what I wanted.

This is almost exactly the same terrain I used in my "Warrior Tools" contest entry. This picture got its start because you could see so little of the terrain in that picture, and there was some really great stuff out of the frame .

Where things start to get unstable seems to be in using Mix maps in displacement; very handy - in fact, brilliant - but adding more than one is really asking for trouble, at least sometimes. I've started to think that Max is trying to allocate a lot of *contiguous* memory for those composited maps. That's the only way I can explain how it may just bomb out when there seems to be enough RAM available. Anyway, by the time the scene was really shaping up, the only way I could render it was as a network rendering project even though I'd be rendering it on my main machine anyhow.

And naturally enough it got more difficult when I wanted to render the final scene on three other machines with less RAM. Fotunately the trees and boxes in the foreground don't really interact with the other elements, so I was able to render them separately, and I used a low res environment map for the sky at render time. I saved the frame out as a TGA, so the sky area ended up completely transparent, and then I was able to composite it into the image in Photoshop.

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Bradley W. Schenck
Saga Shirts - the Celtic art your mother WARNED you about: [link]

Tres Fantastique!! Classic Sci-fi goodness (!) and now the secret's out. Wink, nudge, say no more, eh?
Really, outstanding.

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By the time they had diminished from 50 to 8, the other dwarves began to suspect "Hungry"...

Thanks so much, I may one day understand that...

...haha, no I am facinated by procedural textures actually and the technics of texture mapping...amazing how edwin catmull and others got started developing this stuff and awesome how anyone has access to it today. That's a really creative idea to use a render of the lighting to generate a mask that creates variety in the terrain, I really appreciate the tutorial.

I love your world and can't wait to see more.

It really worked out, beautiful narrative piece, love always your retro sci-fi style

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^{"Why do we strive for excellence when mediocrity is required?" Paul Arden}

Fantastic work, I love this, the detail and especially the info you have shared with us about making it. Thanks.

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My Photo Website



If you're not yourself, who willb?

Awesome... and I've been thinking of retrofuture too.

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[link] - my homepage