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You and me both! Except that I have not been too quiet about it. :lol:
Can't wait to play with Dart's scene this weekend.
makes it a whole lot easier with great products to use, so many uses as already has been shown from the renders by everyone...... thanks
@headwax
you think it may be wedged under that flying machine of mine?
good hiding spot!
Usually, I am none too quiet either.
However, I do get tired of “raging against the machine” when it appears to be a fruitless enterprise.
It is an old chestnut, but has value nonetheless:
Give me the strength to accept the things I can not change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
However, the wisdom part has a tendency to wane based upon my level of frustration.
Some months ago, I drafted an “open business proposal to DAZ” and shared it with our buddy, Dart. He suggested that I send it to DAZ_Spooky and DAZ_Kevin. I did and received a terse reply from DAZ_Spooky stating that he forwarded it to the powers that be. I have to this date, received no further response and, of course, this does not surprise me.
I am, in light of the smug and unresponsive nature of DAZ, considering starting a thread with the proposal to see what, if any, reaction it would garner from the Carrara community.
Here I am, diverting my friend Dart’s thread again – time to move on, and start playing with the Badlands!
It was nice to “hear” from again.
It is not accurate... nor is it entirely random. I am a part time amateur astronomer - but not actively of late. I love to hunt galaxies and faint fuzzies with my 6" Criterion Dynascope of 1972 vintage that I completely restored. Anyways, when I got Carrara I just wasn't happy using image maps for stars. I wanted more control than that - hence Starry Sky for Carrara was born.
It uses four (by default) invisible spheres to project the replicated stars onto, which are incredibly low-polygon spheres. The outer and inner star fields are entirely random, used as the faint filler stars. I worked hard on the settings to get the feel that I wanted, with clustering, the right numbers, etc.,
There are then two star pattern fields of stars. One I've mapped to distribute the stars in the pattern shapes of our earth-bound view of the constellations. The other uses a much more chaotic map, so that you can get vast differences in patterns by shuffling the replicator - and is meant for scenes that are not looking up from earth.
So the replicator for the earth-bound constellations is using a map of large white dots, forming many of our constellations as seen from Earth, but I spent a lot of time shuffling across this map to get the colors and sizes as close as I could to make it look convincing to me - even knowing that there is no real accuracy involved... more of a Sci-Fi Space Art perspective.
When making animated space travel renders, it's really fun to slightly rotate some of the fields at different rates, faster towards the middle, and no rotation at all for the furthest away. Looks cool.
Another thing regarding control, is that individual fields of stars can be hidden for less stars, or duplicated and rotated/scaled for more.
We can also use both earth-bound and outer orbit patterns together for more shapes in the sky.
Finally, 'outer view' camera, called Panorama view, allows us to see the star field globes from the outside, looking in. This helps for scaling the globes to the scene, animating movements, etc.,
So for space travel, we can use the ease of keeping our star ships relatively immobile, translation-wise, in the center of the scene, where they load in, and move Space to create the travel effect. Alternately, we can use this outer view to see the translate tool for placing the star ship (or whatever) at or beyond the edge of the star fields, and into the center of the scene, past it, whatever we need to do. It's really fun doing the 'jumping in from hyper-space' sort of animations, where the ships almost seem to magically appear before our eyes, but they've actually just travelled a great distance across the scene in very little time, with a very subtle zoom of the camera that happens from the very beginning of the sequence to the end... the two speeds lend to that cool look they use in space operas.
But also, it comes in handy for setting the boundaries of where we need the stars in the scene, dynamically too, if need be. Since super drastic changes of scale getting bigger can make a lot of the furthest stars to disappear, Starry Sky comes with two scene scale presets, Large and Medium. So if you indeed are using a medium scene, but it is so expansive that the medium preset is way too small, you might try using the preset for large scale scenes. If the scale you need is somewhere right in the middle, it's easy to change the scale of the stars, too - all at the same time, or individual sizes or colors separately, as they all occupy the same space in the scene.
Download the included 30 page Manual, if you like ;)
On our planet, this amount of ground fog combined with this much brightness in the sky would certainly prevent us from seeing this many stars. But on planet Carrara, anything goes!
I've been having a lot of fun with this--so much to see! Here's one more, with a little text to go with it:
As I was walking down a path
Looking for things familiar
I saw nothing good or true
But it is all I can remember
---From The Badlands
I have a slightly off-topic question--I hope you don't mind. I noticed in your presets that the render boxes (the colored squares that represent the CPU(s) in action) are really small. I see the benefit of this, but I can't find where that is set. My boxes are huge and one CPU can get bogged down for a while--smaller boxes means I can through more CPUs at the intensive areas. Did you set them at a smaller size on purpose, or am I seeing something that's not there?
Yes, I set them that way.
Go to the render room. The first pane, where you set which render engine, object and shadow accuracy, etc.,
go to the bottom of that pane: Tile Size. Badlands is set at 32
All you guys and gals...
Thank you so much for your support! I'm so glad that you enjoy the product. It was a lot of fun to build ;)
Ahhh! Thanks Dart! I'm making that change to my base startup scene right now....it's an awesome idea.
It really is. I use eight cores, and I don't like it when just one gets stuck on details that could otherwise be engaged by the rest of them! ;)
Thanks Dartan that's pretty clear :)
Dart nailed it and answered this before I woke up. But basically, if you have plenty of processing cores on your system, then make these "tiles" as small as possible.
When doing multi-threaded work like this is, it is usually best to give the system a lot of little things to do. If you make the tiles too big, then depending on your scene complexity and render size, you can actually take much longer to complete a render because of not using the cores efficiently.
Really enjoying this model... ;-)
a variation of an image I did for the PC board...