Plan Views of an Albatros Aircraft
Rendering
Rendering is the most fun and gratifying aspect of the project. In a way it's more like photography than anything else, you pick an angle, a lens, and lights, then shoot. The lighting is the most complicated part and it took me a while to get a feel for it. The problem is that there are too many variables
I spent a long time adding lights and modifying property tables and being confused at the results, The key is to define your material properties (color, diffusion smoothness) with a consistent light level, it might sound obvious but it took me a couple of years to figure out.
I decided to use only solar lighting and then tailor all the material properties to behave well under these conditions. Then you add additional lower intensity lights as needed for individual images. I like the solar lighting interface because it makes more sense to me. You tell the software where the model is located the date and time and it figures out the solar angle.
The Albatross model is facing west so if I'm trying to render the port side from the front I move it to Anchorage (sun coming in from the South) and set the date (usually summer) and the time in the morning (10:30 usually works out well) so that I get highlights on the fuse. If I want the sun higher in the sky I'll go for Boston, or later in the day. For the Starboard side I usually go to Melbourne.
It might be a little crazy ? but if you knew the exact time and location and the heading of the AC you could input the info into the software and get the exact sun location.
The rendering process was easier before the model grew to its present size and my laptop is now totally useless for anything but modeling and rendering subassemblies. The problem is that the software has to load the whole model and ALL the maps into RAM, when it runs out, it crashes. The laptop has 128 Meg of RAM - my PC at work 256 Meg. So I have to do it at work after hours. I'm pretty sure that sooner or later the 256 meg of ram will run out as well, luckily there's a high end (and expensive) super number crunching PC at work which was bought to run analysis for the engineers. It has dual processors and 1GIG of RAM and I know it is not running 24 hours a day.
And best of all the administrator of this wonder PC just happens to be a friend so...
Plan Views
I'm pretty happy with how the plan views turned out. All four images are
at the exact same scale so you should be able to reference back and forth
between them. The sections are a little unclear though,? I could render them
out separately at 2X the scale which would help. But I think the ultimate
solution is to separate the different parts so you can better distinguish
their form.
|
|
 |
 |
 |