TS Tip #1

Truespace has a learning curve.

Despite it's great interface and intuitive (relatively) little icons, Truespace still takes time to learn, and you have to PRACTICE to master it. Just like everything else in life....sigh..... Look at the images in my Art Gallery. Although they are not arranged chronologically, the learning curve is still painfully obvious.

TS Tip #2

There are 3 aspects to good scene design, in ascending order of importance, they are:

Modelling

Texturing

Lighting

Modelling is the least important. Anyone can model - we focus on it too much - it doesn't have to have a bazillion polys to be good, it just has to reasonably approximate the general shape of the object you want it to be. Texturing is second in importance. Even a mundane and simple model can be transformed if it is textured well. And finally the most important, most overlooked, and hardest part of scene design (well, at least for me) is lighting. The imortance of good lighting can't be stressed enough. How many times have you seen an image that had excellent models and cool texturing only to be ruined by poor lighting. I mean it doesn't matter what it looks like if you can't see it, right?

TS Tip #3

Realistic glass is tough to make. Here's my formula:

Use some color and don't make it perfectly transparent.

Use some refraction, doesn't matter how much, just wing it.

You have to use the Metal Shader - it just won't look good without it.

Scan-line glass looks like crap, raytrace it. Period.

Here, look at the bottle in Obstetrical Still Life.

These are the settings I used:

- R251,G247,B255

- Metal Shader

- Ambient 0.3

- Shine 0.88

- Rough 0.94

- Opacity 0.99

- Refract 1.18

TS Tip #4

Realistic metal is tough to make. Here's my formula:

USE THE METAL SHADER! It seems ridiculous that I'd have to say this, but.......

Light it up man! Looks flat otherwise. Put a shiny object in a dark room, doesn't reflect anything until you point a light at it, does it?

There HAVE to be other objects in the scene, otherwise there's nothing to reflect, right?

Need an example? Check out the large brass gear the little guys are standing on in Visitors....

These are the settingsI used:

- R220,G149,B86

- Metal Shader

- Ambient 0.1

- Shine 0.97

- Rough 0.23

- Opacity 1.0

- Refract 1.0

TS Tip #5

Get more RAM

I've used TS in 9 megs, 12 megs, and now 32 megs, I wish I had more. Get it?

Oh, and get a Pentium .................. if you can afford it.

TS Tip #6

Get to know Alpha Channels

Figuring these babies out opened up a whole new world for me, they are a great way to simplifiy an object and decrease your poly counts. Instead of modelling that grate, just put an image map with the alpha channels activated, bump the image back onto it. Looks great, casts shadows too. See the trash can in Bucks? - alpha channeled texture on a cylinder. Need another example? Look at the doorway in Gehn's Library.

TS Tip #7

Use the Booleans

Yes, those object deform tools are cool, but I rarely ever use them. You can model just about anything with the booleans (and the lathe/extrude tool).

If TS says it can't do the boolean operation, believe it. Trust me, no matter how much you fiddle with that damn boolean identity thingie the chances are you will NEVER get it to work. You are better off just starting over. You listening out there Caligari?.......

TS Tip #8

Bump Maps aren't perfect

Sometimes a bumpmap just won't hack it, and you'll have to model in the surface detail to make it look right. This is what I had to do for the water in Annunciation. Initially I just put a bump map on a plane for the water. That looked like crap, so I actually modelled in concentric rings using the Landmaker utility. It looks much better now and is far more believable.

TS Tip #9

Sometimes bumpmaps are perfect

Here's a good example.

You can see how the bumpmap (the little white image off to the side)has changed this fairly bland pedestal into an intricately carved one. Good texturing can really transform a scene.

TS Tip #10

Go easy on the bump maps

I've found that a very subtle amplitude setting achieves a better effect, say putting the Amp setting at 0.01 - 0.03. Notice that's not 0.1 - 0.3 but rather 0.01 - 0.03.

TS Tip #11

Exploit the procedural marble texture

Do not use this to actually make marble, there are much better marble texture maps out there. Do use this for really cool special effects. Procedural marble makes great skies, lightning, electrical effects, swirling gas balls, nebulas, ad nauseum. I applied this to a sky dome to get the lightning bolt in Excalibur. Here are the settings I used:

Stone R62, G56, B60

Vein R221, G255, B254

Grain Y

Turbulence 10.0

Sharpness 0.89

Scale X 2.0

Scale Y 2.72

Scale Z 2.0

TS Tip #12

Everything benefits from the KPT Sharpen Intensity filter

If you buy KPT for no other reason, it should be to get your hands on this filter. It "clarifies" your pix by removing a layer of soap scum from them. You are best off applying it in an image editing program (you have greater control over the effect), but it works OK through the TS plug-ins too.

TS Tip #13

Visit NetNet.Net

Lots of very cool texture and material libraries here, stock up.

Note:

This link doesn't seem to work anymore, if anyone out there knows what happened to this mirror site, would you please e-mail me?

TS Tip #14

Bang it up a little

The problem with 3D modelled objects is that their edges are too perfect, too sharp, too straight. If edges and corners were really that sharp I'd be taking my two year old to the E.R. more often. Add some nicks and dents to make things more realistic. I have created a whole series of funky triangles that I have extruded and glued together at different angles. I use these shapes to boolean out little chips, dents, and splits. Look at the dock in Water, they're subtle, but they add immensely to the realism.

TS Tip #15

Dirty it up, man

In real life paint fades and chips, mud spatters, nails rust, dust accumulates. When creating textures, little touches like this can really spiff up the scene. In Window the sign on the brick wall was a material map that I dirtied up to look like an old faded and chipped painted sign. First I created a sign with black writing on a white background, and lightly brushed white unevenly all over the surface to fade out the letters, then I put a thin yellow border around the whole sign and lightly spray-painted yellow all over the sign. Using the image utilities in TS, I converted the yellow to an alpha channel (the color in the upper left corner). This is what the final texture looked like. When applied to the brick wall, the little alpha channels look like chipped paint. I used a similar technique for the sign in Bucks.

TS Tip #16

Never let a 4 year old with a squirt gun anywhere near your laptop computer

Personal experience on this one, it can get ugly.........

TS Tip #17

Damn, I wish I hadn't triangulated it!

Have you ever triangulated an object and then wished you hadn't? Too late! Truespace won't let you undo it.

Here's how to fix it

place a plane next to the object - but not touching it - then boolean subtract the plane from the object, Voila! Your untriangulated original object is back , just like new.

TS Tip #18

Fog sucks

Avoid using Truespaces's fog function if you can - my experience is that it just doesn't look very foggy.

If you must use fog, avoid using any textures with alpha channels behind the "near fog" setting.

TS will add fog to the transparent parts of the texture making them visible and thus ruining the effect.

This is a bug (and a pretty big one too if you ask me). There is no way around it.

Look at This. Sucks doesn't it?

TS Tip #19

Making grass and plants is tedious

Making all those blades of grass and positioning them is a real drag.

Make three variants of your grass object - one straight, one slightly bent, one more bent.

Copy each variant and then randomly place the six at different rotations and angles, glue them all together.

Copy the group a couple of times and place them at different rotations in your scene. As long as each group is slightly rotated, no one will ever know that they are all the same. Works great and saves alot of time. that's how I made the bamboo and sea grass in The Bamboo Grove.

TS Tip #20

A good utility is worth it's weight in gold

Here are some utilities I consider absolutely indispensable.

Landmaker - Makes terrains, landscapes, faces, anything from a bitmap "topographical" image

Exploder - Not only does this blow things up (it's great fun) but it also has a gravity and a particle system (of sorts).

Texture Magic - POVRAY is a pain in the butt to use, but it has some of the best procedural textures by far. With this utility you can make tileable texture maps from POV's procedural textures.

Kai's Power Tools - need I say more?

Poser - Makes great human figures, impossible to animate or boolean, but great nonetheless.

TS Tip #21

Why can't I keyframe texture changes?

make sure that you use the "paint over" (the little paint roller thingie) tool whenever changing textures in an animation

If you use the any of the other paint tools, it just won't work.

Pretty basic rule, huh? ....took me forever to figure out....

TS Tip #22

How to make an animated candle flame

First make a circle (about 10 sides) with the "Regular polygon tool".

Quad divide it.

texture it completley transparent.

Using the "Paint Vertices" tool, paint the center point slightly yellow with about 50% transparency.

Grab a few of the upper points on the circle and drag them upward into a flame shape. Voila!

Keyframe a few object deforms over about 60 frames (ending up at the original shape) and you have an animated candle flame that you can loop. Here's 2 examples, a still and an AVI.

TS Tip #23

Brilliancy Mapping

This tip graciously donated by Chris O'Riley.

Similar to how objects in the real world are rarely perfect (corners of tables are always beat up...) the same can be said about surfaces (textures).

Rarely do you find a surface that is evenly smooth (or rough) and evenly shiny (or dull). And while bump mapping solves the smooth/rough problem, trueSpace doesn’t provide a readily apparent way to simulate a surface which is shiny in some areas and dull in others.

Metal, for example, is generally evenly shinny. That is of course, until scratches, scrapes, rust and corrosion create areas which are no longer shiny. To convincingly simulate a weathered metal surface you need to use bump mapping to create the actual pitted surface as well as brilliancy mapping to achieve areas which are no longer shiny.

Brilliancy mapping is easily achieved by using the Material Rectangle

here, look at these textures to start:

iron - The bitmap used to create the Iron.txr file using the image utilities (intensity setting).

bump - The exact same file as Iron.bmp only with the contrast turned way down to get a more subtle bump map. (Lighten your monitor if this looks all black to you).

The rendered result of this excercise.

this is a very subtle effect, so look closely...

OK, here goes:

First create a rectangle "floor", gave it a shiny surface and apply the bump map.

Second, create a material rectangle and siz it to cover the entire surface.

Then using the Iron.txr file, paint the material rectangle with a completely dull texture (make sure the overlay setting is not checked).

Finally, put a sphere above the floor to give it something to reflect.

Finally, here's the rendered result of this example again.

Notice how the pitted areas of the floor don't reflect the sphere as much as the rest of it. These areas will also be lighter or darker than the rest of the floor depending on the angle of the light sources. By reversing the textures, the spotted areas could be made to be more shiny than the rest of the floor as well.

Of course, with more complex maps, this texture could be made much more realistic, but even this gives the floor a more interesting look than texture or bump mapping alone could have.

Once again, thanks to Chris O'Riley (Daddy O95@Aol.com) for this tip.

TS Tip #24

Tapering Spirals

This tip graciously donated by Luisa Arevalo Klose (Rat Scabby).

This tip is for those wanting to make spiral minarets, screw tips, etc... It's a good lesson on the lathe tool.

1. From the primitives library, select a plane with a resolution of 1.
2. Scale the X and Y coordinates to .5 meters.
3. Rotate it 90° around the X axis.
4. Left click on the axes tool, select normalize rotation and then left click on the axes tool again.
5. Select the lathe tool and then right click over it to bring up the lathe properties panel.
6. Type in these coordinates:
Segments 16
Angle 180
Radius 4
Rotation 0
Helix -.5
7. Select the lathe tool again to create the sweep.
8. Exit lathe session by selecting the object tool(the white arrow).
9. Rotate the whole scene around the World Y axis until the new face is facing you.
10. Select the Point Edit:Faces tool and click inside the new face to select it.
11. Repeat steps 5 through 10, 15 times.

*NOTE: The second time you select the lathe tool, you'll notice that the rotation of the curve has changed. From now on, you'll have to change the rotation coordinate to 180 degrees.

*NOTE: The only other coordinate that will change each time is the Radius. Decrease the radius by .25 each time. For example, the second time, the lathe properties panel should look like this: Segments 16
Angle 180
Radius 3.75
Rotation 180
Helix -.5

Once again, thanks to Luisa Arevalo Klose for this tip.