About Race styles.

[HP Delron]

I have created several races, and although i can i can do just about everything i need to do to make these races finished (Descriptions, Histories, AI files etc.) I lack both aritistic and techical skills to create orginal pictures for them. I have several ideas on what they should like, but i struggled making ship sets for SEIII. What can someone like me do???

[chewy027]

do a search for Doga on the forum and download that porgram. Many beginner shipset makers use that program. It's easy to use and its free.

[Andr�s]

I've developed a crude method to easily make SE4 pseudo-3d race styles based in SE3 shipets.
Using a displace filter in 3d studio to give height acording to brigtness, and the same pic as texture map.
Example using one of original SE3 races
Results look surprisinlgy good considering ther are based in icon sized 32x32 pics.
Using better source images (and multiple images if necessary) results can get be really better.

[oleg]

Andr�s, can you please elaborate a little more how did you do it (what program, etc). I always wanted to give a 3-D look to Fractal function shipset but could not find a way.

[Andr�s]

Sorry but you'll need 3d Studio Max to use this.

I have a saved scene with a flat grid mesh that is painted with the source picture as texture map (diffuse map) and where I apply a displace modifier (a modifier that changes height based on brightness of a texture) using the same picture (but it can be a different one).
Then all I have to do is change the source picture to render every ship.
Really easy, and it only takes a few seconds, actually cropping the original shipset into individual ships and renaming rendered results to the appropriate names takes more time than making the "pseudo-3d" part.

Now that I think about it this method can work quite fine with those fractalian "ships".
If you want, you can post or send me by email your source pics so I give them a try.
From what I remember of that fractal making program you used it can probably be interesting to try using the same source image with different color palettes to use as "diffuse map" and "elevation displace".
I don't know if you kept playing and improving that shipset after Last time I downloaded it. But another thing that IMHO your fractal shipset needs is a better differentiation of ships sizes and types. Everything looked too much the same.

[Val]

DoGA Site

[Andr�s]

Oleg, I just emailed you the first thest I made with your fractals.
What do you think?

[oleg]

Thanks,

I did not put any new efforts into fractalins since I could no make them "3-dimensional" and as you mentioned they all look very much the same. Now, if you can make a sample ship from one or two imagies and it will turn up nicely, I'll go back and remake the whole ship set !

fractalian ship set can be downloaded from "old forum" :

old race download section

If there are problems, I'll send it by e-mail.

Oleg.