I'm modeling a spaceship and i'm trying to figure out how to make it so you can see the lights on the outside of the spaceship just where the windows of the cabins are and not everywhere. How would you guys do spaceship lights? Also what is the best way to do the blue firery thrust from the engines of the spaceship?
Just enable shadows dude.
it just doesn't look right, i want that sort of light effect you know when you see a star cruiser and all the cabin lights are on and look realistic, also what about the thrusters?
kind of like this, do you think this is all texture?
i found this pic on another site, not my model!
looks like incandescent textures, yes.
what exactly are incandescent textures? are they just textures with lights drawn on? for example would you do this texture and lights in photoshop then apply to geometry?
Shading works with a set of rules (usually called code, algorithm or strong methods based on where you come from). Now the shader has several inputs act as data for the computation rule. Some of this data is supplied by the renderer, and some by the user. For a lack of a better term let use define for the purpose of this document that those things marked as user provides is called channel (channels in maya are called as of fact attributes but let use keep this general). Whenever you input something to channel thats not static over the entire shader we call it a texture. A texture can be a bitmap file but it could also be anything else that has any sense of varying for any reason whatsoever.
Now if something is called a Incandescent texture its something thats been connected to the incandescent channel of a shader. Now because every shader wirter in existence is supposed to provide their own interfaces, with lack of any accepted standards on what you need to input, they do the next best thing they try to name the channel with a descriptive name. In this case they have chosen incandescence (if you dont know what incandescence is read up on wikipedia, webster...), sure they could have called the channel addThis or selfIllumination but incandescence fits the bill and is one word. As a added bonus it refers to physics, wich shader writers like to refer to. All maya default shaders call this channel incandescence as it happens.
Now then since our perception only sees light and absense of it, and does a comparasion then anything thats just operates on its own without impact on the global lightning scheme it appears as its lit. Its not nothing in 3D is actually its just a trick.
for example would you do this texture and lights in photoshop then apply to geometry?
If you happen to like using photoshop then yes why not just draw the lights on black bacground and read it into a file node and connect to the incandescence channel of your shader.
cool i understand thankyou!