Making SE4 ShipSets with Moray

[henk brouwer]

"do you design your own textures or do you usually start with one from the Moray Library and mess with it or do you perhaps use third party texture sets? If it's the Last option, where's a good place to pick up some good textures for ship hulls? I'm just using the base metallic silver Library texture for the ship hull right now and I modified that texture to create a nice bronze for the other parts. Do you rely on the texture itself for the extra details on the ship hull or do you create all the small detail from 3D shapes you've embeded into the hull of the ship with different textures and colors? I can see how both approaches would work."

Ussualy I start from scratch when making a texture. Some examples of textures should be downloadable from Universal shipyards under the se4 extra's menu (made by Andrey)

When rendering a picture in moray/povray try to switchon 'anti-alliasing'under the render options menu and set rays to something like 2x2 or 4x4, this will make many textures look smoother and less psychedelic.

Also check out Andreys site, the ora planet forum and site, the forum's are there especially to discuss artwork and questions.

[ColdSteel]

Henk, Thanks.

Do you have the link to Andrey's site? I had already downloaded his sample textures from Univeral Shipyards but haven't played with them yet.

Also, do you know how to lock your CSG object's evaluation state so that they don't revert every time you load up your scene?

[ColdSteel]

Another question.. Does anyone know if MDL model viewer software exists anywhere out there? I know that I once had a Quake MDL viewer that would allow you to load up the model and the texture (skin) and then rotate and view it from any angle. I'm sure the id MDL format probably isn't compatible with Moray, though.

If it exists anywhere, this MDL viewer would be really handy since in Moray you have to re-render the model anytime you want to see it from a different perspective (in final rendered form, that is). Any ideas, comments, suggestions?

[pathfinder]

not sure if they were MDL or not but cnet's download.com had several different kinds of viewers available/listed.

[ColdSteel]

I looked but I didn't see anything that would view Moray .mdl files or Pov-Ray .pov files.