Entry #18

Filename: Nova.jpg
Created by: S.E.O'Brien
E-Mail: sobrien@email.dot.gov.au
Web-Site:http://www.GeoCities.com/Hollywood/Studio/3035

Artist's Comments
This picture shows the U'tcha (a nasty race of aliens - you can tell they're aliens because they've got an apostrophe in their name!) attacking a United Earth Force (UEF) fleet. The UEF Fighters and Bombers come out to join the party, and all hell breaks loose.

This picture is my first BIG scene. All of the objects are designed and modelled by myself - though you can see touches of inspiration from other sources ("The fighters look like Colonial Vipers on steroids..."). After using LightWave for about 3 months I decided that I needed some space stuff (or I wouldn't be a REAL 'Waver), so I came up with the concept of a 4 minute short animation composed entirely with LightWave. Now another 2 months have gone by, the Movie isn't finished yet, but I made some changes to a few of the models and pieced together "NOVA".

The Star field is original, though I lost some colour detail in the final render. I created several random point polys, booleaned the centre out, jittered the points and applied some colour and luminosity. The final star field has 6 different layers of stars.

The nebula was created by using multiple layers of LightWave fractal noise on a flat poygon. I then took this image into Photoshop for some smudging and blurring. A Twirl distortion finished off the look I was after. I saved this image, then converted it to a Grey Scale image for the Luminosity Map - after adjusting the Brightness and Contrast, of course.

Due to RAM restrictions (64MB is just NOT enough) I rendered this image in 2 sections.

The background consisted of the star field, nebula, all of the Capital Ships, the exploding Cruiser and attacking U'tcha, and the 2 Bombers and 2 Fighters in the top right hand corner of the picture. I then used this image as a background and placed the remaining 4 U'tcha, the other Fighter and Bomber, and the explosions on the BattleShip (in the middle).

Total Rendering Time came to approx. 3hrs 45min on a Pentium 166 MMX, 64MB RAM.

This image is my first foray into the LightWave Mailing List Contest, so be nice... and if you like any of the components e.g. Star Field/Nebula send me an e-mail and I'll give you the images/objects (be warned: the nebula is 4 MB uncompressed)

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