CompuServe Thread

#jpgs

16 messages in this thread
#136075From: ARA GREGORIANNov 15, 1994 12:28 AM
wooooww!!!! I love these images. Are they a part of an animation?? CD rom?? Video?? Can you share how you created the fire disks around the suns??? Very nice!!! thanks for uploading them. Ara
#136202From: MechadeusNov 15, 1994 1:00 PM
Ara, >>MASTER! Does this mean you'll kiss our feet and massage our weary backs with scented oils? >>Are they a part of an animation?? >>CD rom?? Video?? Each of the screen shots are part of longer animations between(or a part of) interactivity. The game will be out on 2 – 3 CDs, both MAC and PC. Remember that the images I uploaded are pre- video-compression, so the image quality will suffer some :< >>Can you share how you created the fire disks around the suns??? Yup. I think I explained it a bit a while ago when I uploaded my first attempts here as SUNS.JPG. I'll look around for that message if it still exists. Nope. Uh, maybe I have it written down somewhere else… OK, the sun and it's flares are made with the Yost Group's smoke SXP, and the flares are disks that pass through the spherical sun, using a mask and opacity map that's basically a white circle with a radial gradient along the edge from white to black. This lets the animd smoke fade out as it leaves the sun's surface. And the mask lets the space between each tendril be transparent. The sun surface is 3 concentric spheres, one has the basic texture, the next has sun spots (just played with smoke unitl I got that splotchiness), the last is an overall brightening layer of smoke, applied additively, with the falloff set high, so the sun is brighter in the center. Whew… the whirly planar gas cloud around the sun is a Yost Displace'd grid with an opacity map, and then there's an opacity-mapped sphere that surrounds everything with a bitmap of one of the NASA nebula images. Beyond that…. is some stars we made with Scatter, so we could have variable-size stars, and we could fly through them. Does that explain it enough? Eric
#136252From: Yost GroupNov 15, 1994 3:49 PM
It's great to hear how you're using all this stuff together, Eric. That's the way we intended it to be used! Very very nice images — thanks for the explanation. – G
#136312From: MechadeusNov 15, 1994 9:00 PM
>>Very very nice Thanks! We worked hard for 'em. Eric
#136259From: ARA GREGORIANNov 15, 1994 4:07 PM
Massage your back with hot oil?!! I dont know if my heart can handle that! But Kiss your feet?! Anytime. I will kiss them even more if you keep uploading great images like that and keep sharing some of your knowhow with us!! (we are not worthy, we are not worthy…..) Love your work!! Thanks a lot for the input. Take care Ara Massage your back with HOT OIL?!HUMMM!!$$$$$!!#@1err*&)\x>=&%x….Come to think of it……… ):->
#136315From: MechadeusNov 15, 1994 9:08 PM
>>HOT OIL Whoa there…. maybe we should move to one of those other forums… Thanks for the praise. The thanks (and oil!) also goes to all the other Mecha artists who are making this stuff possible. Hope you've got a big bottle….
#136526From: David RhotenNov 16, 1994 4:52 PM
Eric: Your Daedalus stuff is a knockout, man. Groovy. Fab. Gear. If the game is HALF as good as the graphics, it'll be a winner! Dave
#136768From: David RhotenNov 17, 1994 5:16 PM
By the way, when will it be out? Dave
#136908From: MechadeusNov 18, 1994 1:10 PM
>>when will it be out? Deirdre sez "early 2nd quarter," so that's it. Eric
#136928From: David RhotenNov 18, 1994 3:58 PM
WHAT!!!?? Wait until April-June?? Man, I thought, with all the little previews we've been seeing here and in mags that it was almost out! Well, I guess that gives me a little time to build my monetary supply back up after buying this new machine! Dave
#137030From: MechadeusNov 19, 1994 1:42 PM
>>Wait until April-June?? Yup. We were hoping on a Christmas release, but the scope of Daedalus demanded the extra development time. I know it'll be worth waiting for. Eric
#137068From: David J. MarksNov 19, 1994 9:03 PM
>> I know it'll be worth waiting for. I took a peek at the sample JPG's. Great work!
#136987From: Tim c BrananNov 19, 1994 1:28 AM
I downloaded you jpegs last night, and I just had to say they were fabulous. Keep up the excellent work.
#137032From: MechadeusNov 19, 1994 1:44 PM
>>fabulous. Keep up the excellent work. Thanks. Just wait'll you see what's next on our plate…. Eric
#137076From: Tim c BrananNov 19, 1994 10:09 PM
How did you do the wispy glowing plasma (or whatever it is) on one of the images? did you have to paint it by hand, or some quicker method?
#137469From: MechadeusNov 22, 1994 2:23 PM
Tim, >>How did you do the wispy glowing plasma…? I'll assume you mean the sun images– I explained it a while back in this thread, but I'll put it up here again for you. It's definitely quicker than painting by hand, and the resulting animation isn't rotoscoped-looking. One of the images in DAED2.JPG has a hand reaching into a white glowing hole. That was created by rotoscoping over TGAs with Photoshop. Although time- and work-intensive, we couldn't have done it any other way. OK, the sun and it's flares are made with the Yost Group's smoke SXP, and the flares are disks that pass through the spherical sun, using a mask and opacity map that's basically a white circle with a radial gradient along the edge from white to black. This lets the animd smoke fade out as it leaves the sun's surface. And a smoke.sxp mask lets the space between each tendril be transparent. The sun surface is 3 concentric spheres, one has the basic texture, the next has sun spots (just played with smoke until I got that splotchiness), the last is an overall brightening layer of smoke, applied additively, with the falloff set high, so the sun is brighter in the center. Whew… the whirly planar gas cloud around the sun is a Yost Displace'd grid with an opacity map, and then there's an opacity-mapped sphere that surrounds everything with a bitmap of one of the NASA nebula images. Beyond that…. is some stars we made with Scatter, so we could have variable-size stars, and we could fly through them. I hope that explains it well enough. It was fun to do. Eric Chadwick Mechadeus