Anim8or Community

I've been experimenting with different ways of making the "star drive" dome. The problem is that the shape I started with before applying smoothing twice is a power of 2. Unfortunately the stills indicate I need a shape that has 3 as a factor so I'm taking the over all shape of the dome, converting part of it to a spline and lathing it to 30 segments. Smoothing it once gives me 60 longitudinal segments and thus 3 as a factor. I am going to have to do something similar for the bottom half of the saucer proper because I will need to cut 3 landing stairs. BTW, this is just an old man killing time. I have no real project I'm working on. When I have something to show I'll post a link to my gallery on Deviant Art.

I have decided I want to produce my own take on some of the iconic spaceships from classic SciFi films. I'm starting with the C-57D "Space Cruiser" from the 1956 cult film "Forbidden Planet". I found a useable, scalable exterior view and dimensions to make the shape of the hull. I'm not worried about the saucer itself because I can visualize the shapes needed to model the thing.

I'm looking for suggestions on how to do one of the iconic shots in the film, namely the landing. How would you go about getting that double glow underneath the craft when it is landing. I can see there are two different cones but how might I get the edges to be kind of indefinite? I can do transparency and textures even transparency map texture. No problem. I'm looking for suggestions as to how to give those "landing beams" indistinct edges. If there is a tutorial on doing something like this (a "hologram" display?) a simple link will suffice. Otherwise I know there some really talented people in the community and I wanna pick your brains.

I do plan to animate the landing so I will definitely looking for advice on how to animate various elements.

You are the man, Steve, and the true source of knowledge about all things related to your marvelous toy, but when I tried what you said nothing happened. Below is a screen shot after doing the pivot command. I tried it before and it never worked for me. But the mirroring trick does so I'm happy.

For the record I am running V1.00b.1296 27 August 17

"You can alway change a sphere into a subdivision object for finer detail"
Thank you for the answer. I've never needed to sub-divide and object - or at least I didn't know that I might. I guess I'll have to experiment with that element of the program. Again, thank you for the answer. I was just being nosey. I always like to know what went on in a real programmer's mind.

Thank you. I figured it was something like that but I have started taking a new med and was feeling really punk yesterday.

Thanks, Steve. I have downloaded it and have save links to the tutorials. Guess this old dog is going to have to learn some new tricks.

Thank you Steve and @thecolclough. I thought that was the case but wanted to be absolutely certain. I am a devote of the KISS principle and try very hard to only have a single project open at a time.

What I've noticed about using bump maps is that to make it work I have to select all the faces I want to use the bump map on and then apply the material with that texture in it. otherwise if you just select the mesh and apply a material with a bump map it gets really dark.

I've gotten good results with 1440 x 720 bump maps.