Render a Starship Shield Impact - Blender 2.5 - page 4

Mission Checklist
In this project we'll need Blender 2.49b for using a special script that hasn't been ported
yet—as of wriing this topic—to Blender 2.50. If you haven't installed Blender 2.49b, now is a
good ime to do so.
We also need to download two textures: A cold cloudy sky to be used as a relecion map in
a couple shaders and the diffuse map for the planet in the background.
A good place to find free textures on the Internet is www.cgtextures.com . The licensing
of their textures is open to both private and commercial use, under some restricions (see
license page at http://www.cgtextures.com/content.php?action=license ). Let's
go there and download the image called Skies0263 ( http://www.cgtextures.com/
texview.php?id=18926 ) from the Skies Parial secion; this image has a strong stormy
look. A good guide to find it is looking at the URL of the link and checking for the ID 18926 .
This image was chosen because it has blue spots, cloudy spots, strong contrast, and a cold
mood; that way it will look nicer when acing as relecion map.
To g e t t h e t ex t u re fo r t h e p l a n e t , l e t ' s g To t To www.nasa.gov and download one of the free
planet maps ( http://www.nasa.gov/zip/272246main_ven0aaa2.jpg.zip ). As of
wriing this topic, the images can be found by selecing Multimedia → 3D Resources in
the homepage, then choosing Images and Textures in the list of categories; make sure
to download a projected map, not a normal photo of the planet; also pay atenion to the
resoluion and quality of the image, since the planet is going to be quite big in the inal render,
resoluion is very important. For the explanaion we'll be using the Venus texture map, which
has a width of 1440 pixels and a height of 720 pixels, good enough for our purposes.
Before staring work on it, let's discuss how we are going to organize our project. Spliing
the project into smaller parts is very convenient to avoid having to work with a clutered
viewport at some point. For the sake of simplicity, we are going to organize our project in the
following manner:
F One file containing everything
F Separated scenes for the mother ship, the space fighters, the planet, and the nebula
F One main scene to bring together everything (except for the nebula scene) and
composite the final render
It is suggested to have a folder exclusively for this project's files. A good file name could
be space-scene.blend . Do not forget to save as often as possible while working on the
project and use incremental saving, by using the plus buton on the right-hand side of the
filename text entry in the file browser, this way we have an easy way to revert when errors
occur.