Rya'C-Class on Patrol

[Okwa]

@Support As requested, a picture of one of the carriers on mission.

A Rya'C-Class patrol carrier, accompanied by two Kawalsky-Class frigates and two Teldy-Class corvettes, control an astroid field on pirate bases. The three larger ships take up a waiting position. Meanwhile, the Teldy-class corvettes fly deeper into the astroid field. In addition, two UCV-304β/D drones are launched from the two upper hangars of the Rya'C-Class Carrier, which can penetrate even deeper into the asteroid field than the corvettes. Should a pirate base be discovered, the two Kawalsky-class frigates, escorted by the carrier's F-302s, would deploy their onboard boarding parties, 60 marines and 240 GMQ-101 "Guardian" RGVs (ground combat drones) each, towards the pirate base.

I intentionally made the scene darker because I got a lot of positive feedback when I left one of my last Star Trek pictures relatively dark. But maybe I should have given the asteroid texture a bit of shine.

[Support]

@Okwa Thank you Chris

and no, leave it like this, it's perfect without the shine, it makes it feel like it's way deep into space, not near a star, like, the perfect place for a pirate base. I love it

and BTW, I'm working on a new background like stars, a nebula type, with a lot of settings to make it look the way you want, here is a preview, I hope you could use this kind beside the normal stars?...

[Okwa]

and no, leave it like this, it's perfect without the shine, it makes it feel like it's way deep into space, not near a star, like, the perfect place for a pirate base. I love it

and BTW, I'm working on a new background like stars, a nebula type, with a lot of settings to make it look the way you want, here is a preview, I hope you could use this kind beside the normal stars?...

Many thanks, glad you like it.

WOW, that is absolutely brilliant. Is this supposed to replace or extend the previous star setting in Raylectron? Great in any case!

[Support]

to extend not to replace

[Okwa]

to extend not to replace

[Support]

@Okwa Do you want to give it a try?

https://raylectron.com/RaylectronBeta.rbz

Go to the Stars, turn on the Stars and then turn on the Nebula, the rest, I'm sure you'll figure it out

It's not saving the Nebula settings in the model's CFG file just yet, but that's next.

[Okwa]

@Okwa Do you want to give it a try?

https://raylectron.com/RaylectronBeta.rbz

Go to the Stars, turn on the Stars and then turn on the Nebula, the rest, I'm sure you'll figure it out

It's not saving the Nebula settings in the model's CFG file just yet, but that's next.

I will try it out as soon as I can. I'm currently doing some tests on different light settings for a few new models. I can combine the two tests.

[Okwa]

@Support Very nice work, Michael. A really very good extension. And as you said, it's easy to figure out how to adjust things.

BTW, this is my little light experiment. I'm preparing the release of an Ori faction. Like in the series, the ships should be characterized by a glowing sphere in the middle. I wanted to find out the best way to do it. So far so good. I've learned that I can't use one model, for the glowing core of the ships, for all sizes at the same time, as I did here. I simply copied the "energy sphere" of the smallest ship and adapted it to the size of the other ships. However, I have learned that the settings that produce the best results for the smallest ship do not look so good for the larger ships. You can see here that the surface of the sphere of the largest ship is rippling even though it is actually smooth. On the other hand, I can't reproduce this optical impression of a rippling surface on the smaller ships. Or the light in the middle is so bright, at least on the two largest ships, that it is blinding and you can no longer see the details. Although I have set the values for the light source to the lowest possible value.

[Support]

It turned out really nice, a lot less boring than just little stars

When I make a sphere I use the Platonic Solids plugin from the Raylectron tools, it makes the triangles equal all around instead of having poles, and more detailed too so that you can't see individual triangles that create this ripple effect.

For the light being too bright, not only put down the power, but the area too (below zero), since both are used, (power x total area = brightness), and if still not good, darken the color.

[Okwa]

It turned out really nice, a lot less boring than just little stars

When I make a sphere I use the Platonic Solids plugin from the Raylectron tools, it makes the triangles equal all around instead of having poles, and more detailed too so that you can't see individual triangles that create this ripple effect.

For the light being too bright, not only put down the power, but the area too (below zero), since both are used, (power x total area = brightness), and if still not good, darken the color.

Thanks for pointing out the Paltonic Solid plugin. I hadn't thought about that at all. I'll give it a try and see what difference it makes.


Regarding the light. I have adjusted both settings as far down as possible. Don't forget that from a certain area below zero, the area setting makes the scenes darker. I've already gone as far down as I can in this scene.
I also tried a darker color for the light.

BTW, the glowing sphere actually consists of two spheres. A small sphere in the middle as a light source, a larger, colored sphere around it to color and "distort" the light. I edited the texture of the outer sphere in various ways. I tried different values for transparency, color, diffusion, shininess and reflection. I also tried different values for refraction. The worst was the setting for air refraction. This has massively increased the luminosity. Really extrem!
But strangely enough, only on the two largest ships. Their design must be very favorable for good lighting. I also tried a configuration with just the smaller sphere, the light source, and god's rays. Unfortunately, this led to a crash every time.

Today was a productive and interesting day after all. As I said, apart from the fact that I forgot the plugin, which I will try out. I think the best approach is to take into account the design of each ship and look for individual settings for each ship. Well, I still have a few weeks before I want to release this faction on DA. Time will tell.

[Support]

The size of the model also matters because light attenuate at a rate of one over the distance squared, but also proportional to its area. God's ray on a huge sphere is not good, it requires way too many rays and it could crash

Another thing, if you copied the sphere and scaled it larger, I think this will also scale the light power, I'm not sure, that's why I always do "Scale Definition" in Sketchup on components to make sure it doesn't.

For the platonic solids, use Icosahedron and select IcoSphere then set the Level to 4 or more, depending on the radius and how close you need to render it, it will be automatically smoothed. Turn on Hidden Geometry to see the triangles so you can see how even it is compared to the Sketchup sphere making way.

What if you scale your entire model by 100 or even 1000? to make it the size of a big house or something close, so God's ray can work. Select everything, group it, scale it and export. Don't have to save it that way in Sketchup. Just a thought.

[Okwa]

@Support Thanks for the explanations, Michael. Good to know. Now I can correct a whole series of errors.

[Okwa]

@Support Well, I have taken your comment to heart and made the appropriate changes. While editing the scene, I noticed an oddity. Namely, why the glowing sphere of the largest ship in the last image had ripple wave patterns.
I had originally colored the spheres around the light source with the water texture from Sketchup. I actually only wanted to have the white patterns that this texture contains on the outside of the spheres. But, even though I didn't use a normal map, this texture caused ripple patterns. And, no, I had renamed the texture. Raylectron has not automatically set the settings for water textures.
Since that didn't work, I replaced the water texture with a solid light blue texture. Strangely enough, the largest ship had two large spheres around the light source. One in light blue, one with the water texture. No idea how that could happen.

Anyway, I continued experimenting and this is the final result. I am quite satisfied with the visual impression and now I also know, more or less, how I have to adjust the "energy sphere" for the Ori ships, in each case adapted to the size.
I created the outer spheres with the Platonic Solids plugin tool and I have set the refraction to plastic. I had forgotten to try out this setting yesterday.
I reduced the light source to half the size for the three larger ships. In the image here I have also finished the rest of the ship textures. Which I also forgot to do yesterday, although the settings for the other textures also have an influence on the light.

The result is that the spheres look the way I want them to. The only thing is that the ships are still a little too brightly lit. But I will take that into account in the actual image, which is then intended for publication, and reduce the light source again accordingly.

[Support]

@Okwa wow, this one looks way, way better, even the brightness isn't too bad, only if there was a way to make God's ray work on it just to make the center glow, then it would feel so powerful.

The ripples comes from having the Bumb Level set to anything but zero, or, the Refraction index is not zero. Maybe you have 2 of them sitting at the exact same spot, one with the ripples and one without but can only see one of them in Sketchup?

[Okwa]

@Okwa wow, this one looks way, way better, even the brightness isn't too bad, only if there was a way to make God's ray work on it just to make the center glow, then it would feel so powerful.

The ripples comes from having the Bumb Level set to anything but zero, or, the Refraction index is not zero. Maybe you have 2 of them sitting at the exact same spot, one with the ripples and one without but can only see one of them in Sketchup?

Many Thanks. Yes, perhaps the use of God rays would be even more impressive. But hey, what the heck. It's not a problem, just an opportunity to experiment. I love playing around with the settings just to see what the result is. But without actually creating anything.

Absolutely right. That was the problem with the big ship. Now I have removed one and this "fault" has been eliminated.

[Support]

"playing around with the settings" is how you come up with stuff that makes me ask how you did it

[Okwa]

"playing around with the settings" is how you come up with stuff that makes me ask how you did it

I ask myself that most of the time. Especially when modeling my ships. Half of the designs I could not reproduce, or only with great difficulty. You can see the best example right now. Do you think I remember how I create the three larger ships? No, not for the life of me!