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Personally, I like the long nose... it implies a super-weapon for use on special situations and as a single shot-then the weapon is expended-basis, not for rapid-fire combat but for taking on much larger, slow or stationary targets such a large stations, asteroids, etc. Maybe even a planet-cracker of some sort.

This would a good model for game play as you say, but then to be super-detailed for 3D animation or art, title screen, etc.  You could then take the superdetailed ship and use it to create textures for the simpler gameplay model.

Well I personally like it, and would love to super-datail it if you like!

wow! I can't live WITHOUT edge extruding! Was one of the first things I learned to do!  You're guy is looking great! Maybe a little thick in the body...

yeegawd.... It's my fault, I know...

I've been watching this and enjoying the work, but not made noise until now.  Looks really nice, Nick... Suggestion... If you notice on the photo of the "real boat", where you comment on these being thickly painted... there is a texture to be seen that might be nicely emulated with bumpmap. I did something similar to that for a surface of my guard tower, where I created a bumpmap by doing an HSV noise and blurring it heavily, then mucking around with contrast and brightness and getting the effect attached.

I started with a gray field, and went through the steps as below... to end up with the effect on the sphere at the final image. Subtle, but gives a bit more "realism" to the surface.

I know, Nick is the last guy I should be telling anything, but... just had to pop off

I just noticed that Floyd reached 1000 posts today! CONGRATS MY MAN!!! (or monkey??)

I am not really sure this is easily done in anim8or, but I can show you how I would do it knowing what I do know... Yes, it is a lot of work, but if you really want the effect, as I did with my example, you do what you have to do, knowing what you know:

1: Choose the base color that you want your engine-bright to be... and then apply it to that engine area of your ship. For the sake of discussion, make it light blue., very bright.

2: render your scene frame-by-frame in BMP or JPG.

3: Open your choice of image editor... I use GIMP, but GIMP or Photoshop or similar program...

4: Open your BMP or JPG movie frames one at a time... and select the light blue areas you want to glow...

5: Make those engine glow areas into a new layer on top of the original frame.

6: Blur your engine glow layer to the desired glow effectiveness.

7: Save your image in its original BMP or JPG format, knowing that the layers will merge back into one, this time with the glow/blur atop your original flying ship image.

8: Repeat this process for each frame.


Then, combine the edited, now-glowing frames into your intended video format (avi?).

You will have glowing engines.

I did a similar thing when I wanted a glowing effect in a space thing...

If you open the below GIF, you should see a stars in space scene that has 3 faint blue glows come together, brighten and then materialize into a triangle form of three distinct dots with a small "ship" in the middle.

The idea was to have a mass of energy materialize, coalesce and condense into the three spots of light, a ship appearing out of nowhere as if materializing from a wormhole. From this point the ship would then drift steadily toward the camera and then on to its destination.

The difference between my attached file effect and your intended effect is that my "light" starts extremely faint and large, and then shrinks in size and lessens in blur, giving the effect of the energy condensing and increasing in intensity, but then fading as it dissipates, leaving in its place the newly appeared spacecraft.

Your ship glows would blur, but as the ships become smaller, more distant, you would scale down the blur to match the idea of their becoming further away.

Does that make sense? Or would you like me to take time to make a sort of pictorial tutorial?