ZORAK FIGHTERCRAFT FILES by Richard Cowgill Hello! I hope you will find the FighterCraft download useful and fun... I know I did. I created it as part of an ill-fated animation demo which never saw the light of day, but I don't want it to go to waste. Upon download you'll find all the necessary files for rendering and animating this demo . I've included the Infini-D master file, my original textures, pre-production renderings, some original sketches I drew then scanned, and a 10 sec. demo QT of the FighterCraft in motion. And to think, all of this is yours for free... welcome to the information age! Basically I am absolving all legal rights pertaining to ownership, liability or use of these files. My hope is that these can serve as both educational and entertaining, and that people can build on the ideas, art and creation I present to you. Who knows, maybe someone will even share their ideas with me, or show me what they've done to improve it. Let me warn you now that I hope you're running Infini-D on a fast mac, because you're probably gonna need at least 040 power just to make work tolerable. The FighterCraft was done in a spline modeler, and has tons of complex polys. Also the textures for the ship are 24 bit w. alpha (32 bit), and I designed them to be seamless. You may want to try some fun stuff like making the outer texture a bumpmap also, just to see how it looks. The ship idea was partly old japanime in concept, but definitely insectoid. It was designed to look like a bug in space. The sometimes uneven and organic shape is intentional, but I wanted to mix that with a high-tech/dark look. Some of my sketches we're included, scanned in at home just to make sure I had backups. They show how I originally conceived it, as opposed to how it came out in the end. I think most of the differences are minor and are improvements overall. I really do prize the textures. They we're simple, easy and perfect for the ship. I've gotten used to doing really complex textures that take days to finalize, but these were done quickly and simply. Since they fit the bill so well, I consider them personal favorites. The FighterCraft Master File also has an animation sequence in it. For this it's important to note the light called "Source", since it is a reference point. Source doesn't move, and is placed well outside the range at Y100 although you may want to move it out further for final renderings (like Y1000 or so...). Since Infini-D has a weakness in that it cannot scroll through a background image (even though there are ways to get around this) at least you can watch the animation demo and see Source as if it were a star, thereby giving you a point of reference when the camera and ship both move. It's not as complex as it may seem. Infini-D's Sequencer should speak for itself. Renderings should be fine for sizes up to 600x400, since this is the size of the star pattern in the background. I've noticed that below 300x200, the stars get reduced to less than a pixel and get anti-aliased out of the picture. This is easily solvable but I didn't bother to do anything about that, it's nothing that 3 minutes and some image editing couldn't fix. Thanks for taking the time to read this and enjoy the files. Feel free to email me with your questions and comments, I promise I'll respond to all my mail. Richard Cowgill