Artmatic Know How

Multiple Light Sources

Have you ever wished we had another light source in Voyager besides the sun.
I think I have found a way to at least fake one.
When working on the 3D Pro set for Artmatic I discovered a way to create positional light (A light source that is near the viewever as opposed to the sun).
Now I have tried to make use of it for Voyager and was surprised that it actually works!
The picture below shows a terrain which is lit by the moon (taken from the upcoming Alien/Scifi Sky collection) and there is a second light source which illuminates the hole.
I think it has great potential...
2nd-Lightsource
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Moon Surface

Here is a possible moonsurface as seen in AM. The small craters are generated by the Craters component. The more prominent craters are built from primitives. This way much more control is possible, like shaping the craters, adding rubble, the way they overlap etc.
AM-Moonsurface
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Asteroids

When I went through my moon, planet systems I was quite happy with my arsenal. Then I saw a image of an asteroid. The most obvious about it was that the asteroid was not perfectly round but rather looking like an enormous stone.
I also knew that this would challenge me and I equally knew that this would not be easy to achieve with Artmatic.
There were earlier attempts to create stones, meteors and asteroids but they all failed. But they all were experiments I did a while ago and since my experience with Artmatic had been growing in the meantime, I was tempted to find out if I could work it out this time.
...and after days of trial and error I finally found a convincing way to do it (see below).

3D-Asteroid-small
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SciFi Sky

The UFO is from Eric...

A-21b-Ufo2
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Artmatic Moons

Below is a link to a slideshow with some of my favourite Artmatic moons. Many of them will be part of the Alien/SciFi sky collection I am currently working on.

They all share the following features:

1. 3D shading. The shading of the textures aligns with the light direction automatically.
2. Correct mapping of the craters
3. The texture can be rotated 180 degrees. (The entire moon can be rotated 360 degrees).
4. Packed into a single CT so they can easily be added to Voyager skies.
5. Variable contours added (shift of brightness, color near the edges.

Check it out!
-AM Moons slideshow-

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Artmatic and Voyager Know How

The free Artmatic and Voyager tutorials and tips will be posted directly as blog entries as they get ready. On the sidebar of the Blog page you can find the 2 categories "Artmatic Know How" and "Voyager Know How". So check out the Blog often.
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