Oh, and Lech? When you have all the unofficial LDraw files on your computer, it says some parts might make your file not work or something. Did you ever have that problem?

I wouldn't worry about that because that's mainly referring to working in MLCAD.  You can fix normals, create new polygons, and fill holes in Blender.  So to me, that's not an issue.

Depends on how you want to make the lasers, i.e. within the 3D animation program or postprod.

In this video, I did it within Carrara by using a particle emitter with a elongated sphere with only a glow shader and Aura enabled.

In this video (which was made before I started using Blender and Carrara) was done in post.  What I did was render two footages, one with long cylinders sticking out of the ships cannons to I can track the path of the bullets as they are fired and the one you see now with the bullets I drew superimposed onto it.

As for resolution, depends on your final output.  You don't want to use a 640x480 background if you plan on rendering in HD resolution.

Last edited by Lechnology (January 29, 2010 (04:23pm))

Well what seems to be the problem?  If you're looking for tutorials on making star background, there's a lot out there.  It all depends on your photo editing software.

If you want the emitter itself to point at an object or position, go to Modifier and pick Point At, the rest you can figure out.  In fact, just read the manual, answers are all there.

I believe a good program to make quick, easy star backgrounds in is LSStar (on the LSMaker site), but Blender has a star generator also.

Thanks greatly for all the help!  The only thing is, what do you use to make the explosions???  Does the particle emitter make explosions too, or do you use something else?

Oh yeah, Lech? Or, for the matter, anyone else who can answer this: when you import the head of a person into your program, the head is like an octogon or whatever shape it is, so how do you get all of the sides to be smooth?

That's pretty good but some of your materials need to look a little more like plastic. Otherwise it's awesome.

Would this be possible in Anim8tor? I've always had an interest in 3-D animation, yours especially, Lech. You used MLCAD, for the ships, and Carrara and Blender for what exactly? This seems very interesting and I could use it as fillers (my own if I could even possibly make one, not yours) for backgrounds. I've tried Anim8tor before, and it is somewhat confusing.

Anim8or does not have particle emitters and its shaders/materials are pretty basic.  Additionally, it's rendering speed is slow, comes with it being a open source program written by a group of programmers on their free time.

I use Blender mainly to fix normals and fill empty faces because it's easier to do it in Blender than in Carrara.  Also, Blender treats repeated pieces as one where as Carrara treats each piece as individual meshes.  For example, if you have a model that has multiple 1x1 round bricks and you fix the top hollow stud, the fixes are applied to every 1x1 round brick in the model in Blender.  In Carrara, your fixes is applied to that one piece you selected only.  You have to repeat the same task to the other pieces one at a time.

I would have to see your settings and an example of what you want to do because I can't tell by what you're describing.