What do i use to render ships?

[pathfinder]

Another (free) render engine is POV-RAY. Not sure what it can import.

[Hugh Manatee]

also blender is pretty powerful once you get the hang of it.

[Ed Kolis]

Art of Illusion?
www.artofillusion.org

Has a great renderer (though you have to re-specify the render settings every time you start the program ) and you can export to .obj which can be converted to .x for use with SE5/Starfury!

edit: and I just found out about a cool Art of Illusion script which lets you create something, assign procedural displacement maps to it, and then use the script to convert the results of those displacement maps to REAL triangle meshes suitable for export into games like Starfury! Remember those Metroid beam cannons I submitted to the imagemod? Those were made with AoI procedural displacement maps to do the "details" (I didn't want to do all the detail of modelling them) - but it seems that now I could actually export something using that texture as a Starfury or SE5 ship model!

[Randallw]

I'll try one of the free ones. I didn't realise the artists around here actually paid to register DoGA so they could render.

Edit: and perhaps they don't. I don't know why it says you have to register to render in DoGA 3. I think I'll use DoGA, all I want to do is make ships not artwork and it seems simple enough (once I make some more parts)

[Ragnarok-X]

As mentioned im using Doga l3 and i dont have to pay to render.

[Randallw]

Yeah, i've spent this afternoon learning DoGA 3 and I just started with MetaSequoia for new parts. I can see how others made their ships. Basically I want to work on the terran sovereignty ships here

http://www.shipschematics.net/cgi-bi...rek/others.cgi

[Ragnarok-X]

Could you please provide a link to download the tool you mentioned, and maybe a link to a introduction or tutorial ? By now i only used the standart parts. I once downloaded a part libary, but it majorly sucked to set it up, so i gave up. In fact you had to do a render for each part, then create big thumbnail and incorporate it into doga, in addition you had to rename each "part" so it would show when adding parts...

[Atrocities]

Randallw said:
Yeah, i've spent this afternoon learning DoGA 3 and I just started with MetaSequoia for new parts. I can see how others made their ships. Basically I want to work on the terran sovereignty ships here

http://www.shipschematics.net/cgi-bi...rek/others.cgi

Get the new parts - making parts is a real PITA (Pain In The ***).

Making Federation style ships is very difficult and you must "cheat" to do them. But when you pull it off, it is a very rewarding feeling.

If you want to see what can be done in DOGA, also visit my web site and or the Star Trek Mod web site. (Links are in my signature below)