Shadow Heavy Fighter 1

Although I can bearly make it out on my VDU - the texture looks excellent and much as I remember it. The lazer looks good too. What is next Blakes7? Space1999? UFO?

Thanks Tina! :-) For the stars I used an image created with the Universe Image Creator. http://www.diardsoftware.com/ It does a great job on star fields and offers some neat options, although some of them look a bit too cheesy for my taste. I like it because you can add colored stars to the mix like the sprinkling of red and blue ones I used here. A good tip for it is to use the maximum resolution it will generate and save it as a bitmap. Jpeg will not give results as clean as bitmap. You can apply the finished image to a large flat plane with full ambience and transparency and position it in the background. If you're really good you can add a stellar gas cloud or two like I'm going to do in my next image. ;-)

* Wow! Great piece! I was never a fan of Babylon5 but I know of the series. Very cool! I like how you did the stars also. It looks to be very believeable.

I just tried a volumettric beam and I don't see much of a difference when viewing it from this angle.

I know. I was really just making a joke. Rendered for video this image would shrink considerably and the frame render times wouldn't be too bad. Building a clear starfield that's viewable from variable angles and creating convincing simulations of ships being destroyed would be where most of my time and work would be spent.

Not knowing Babylon 5 at all, I'm a bit lost here. Desaster Area's stunt ship was also black. I do recommend to light it up a bit. So many polys and hardly visible, it's a bit of a waste. The light beam does look a 2D. I don't think using volumetrics on the pencil-beam would increase the render time dramatically.

. Oh ok I didn't know that. There shouldn't be a problem with animating this, if you can render it once you can render an animation, it will use the same amount of RAM. If that is what you are saying.

Gat: By the way, I used the Fuzzy and Additive options for the beam to simulate light. I don't know if I want to play with Volumetrics for it because it took long enough to render this scene without them. If I were to try an animation with a Volumetric beam it wouldn't be ready until next year. LOL The ship alone has 123392 polygons and this is a simple design. By the time I'm done the polygon count for a single frame will be in the millions. Anyone have a few dozen computers they can lend me on a long term basis? ;-)

Thanks guys. Gat: I guess you're unfamiliar with the Babylon 5 TV series. In it there is a race of ancient aliens known only as the Shadows and they used 'living' ships that looked much like this one. They were very hard to see in normal space unless silhouetted against a planet, nebula or luminous gas cloud. I have to work on a hyperspace background in which they would be much more clearly defined. Rashad: Yeah, they were quite scary. In a full motion scene the skin of the ships was animated giving them a living look and the sound they made was a high pitched scream or shriek. If I ever saw something like this for real it would scare me to death! That is if IT didn?t kill me first. The energy beam weapon was incredibly powerful and could literally cut large ships in half like a hot knife through butter. They could ?phase? in and out of normal space without requiring a jump point so you wouldn?t see them coming until it was too late. Scary is what they were alright! BIG TIME SCARY! I know this is a very simple scene and it?s just to showcase the new design I made and my version of the energy beam weapon that was used in the series. I have more ships to design before I actually try a battle scene. ;-)

I like the organic design of the ship. Scary image in a way with this invisible enemy. The scene just wants to be a bit more complete, but so far so very good.

. Great spaceship a bit hard to see, but thats ok not much light in space. Maybe put it next to a sun or a planet to brighten it up a bit? The beam looks good too, but as you used a 2D material up close it will loose it's look, maybe use a volume material? in a light?

Thanks. Both the skin and energy beam took quite a bit of work. I worked out an animation of the skin last year. It came out really good. I may post a short animation of this ship with the animated skin and energy beam. It'll have to be small since this model has a high polygon count and the beam render is slow too. Thanks for the kudo. ;-)

nice GOOD WORK I AM A BABYLON FAN GOOD EFFECT