Here's a great tip for created good spaceship textures: use a
light DINOSKIN texture (with only a slight variation of Your main colour
applied to the object) with the bumpiness set to 0%, this will give a
nice colour variation on the object instead of just a plain colour. You
may have to increase the dinoskin size for various object sizes to start
to look good.
Now just apply the DETHSTAR texture, You need to have a big size
for DETHSTAR to make it look good so increase the default size and take
down the "dirt" and increse the "rust".
Apply large amounts of specularity and hardness and there You
go, a nice spaceship texture. I have uploaded two pics to demonstrate
(ftp to tomahawk.welch.jhu.edu/pub/lw/framestores/ship.jpg and
ship2.jpg).
Ship.JPG uses the nebula texture with Imagine lens-flares to
create a nice engine glow. A good way to create Lightwave lens-flares
in Imagine (as used in Ship2.JPG) is to get a Lightwave user (boo, hiss)
to render a full screen lens-flare on a black background with
lens-reflections off.
Now convert the image from whatever format into TGA/TIF/IFF
using whatever resolution You want (the bigger the better). Use this as
a brushmap TWICE on a 1x1 plane... once as an opacity map and secondly
as a filter map (set to reverse image) so the darker parts with be
see-through. Now make it bright and render it.... It should look like
a fully fledged Lightwave lens-flare in Imagine.
To place it in a scene make sure it's aligned to the object
"camera" and large enough to look good. The lens-reflections (the
coloured spots of light) can be applied to great effect by using a
package such as PhotoStyler using a large low opacity round brush and
whatever colour You want to compliment the picture (reds greens and
blues are best). I've managed to successfully trick my Lightwave owning
friend using this technique by rendering Babylon5 type scenes which
exhaustingly use lens-flares for each scene.
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