Tim Booth loks to be using the same, as the bases ( slightly mirrored ) are the same but ha sopted for the classic renders black back ground, not sure what package the loco was built in, could be Gmax which means PovRay ( if thats what was used ) will render those models as well.
Me, well l'm using a really convoluted route, its basically Gmax scene with a camera and lights, using two omni lights to get a shadow and then one to lighten it make it less severe, ontop of that l'm using an Hemi light ot brighten the whole scene, though my two shots are a little darker than l would have liked.
l've made my own base and added the concrete section to basically add some depth and allow the front shadows to fall onto a null surface to show them off, other wise they become indistinct on the track texture.
l'm slowly building up a render scene where locos can be put in and then rendered, l'll be adding little items like junk and maybe some lights ( track inspection or overhead ) or more of a base, sort of a loco depot scene, that way night shots with pools of light can be rendered.
The problem in Gmax is that shadows and highlights arenot shown when viewed in normal Gmax, thats part of the crippling that Discreet did to bring it down to free level from its big brother 3DSM, so all light levles and such are guess work until you see the final render, it takes a lot of trial and error, belive me
.Once the scene is set up you need to run a script called YaGmax, this basically compiles the scene, to capture this you need to run the Gmax listener sub routine, this stores the YaGmax scene in a buffer store, next you need a utility called XMLGrabit, this grabs trhe scene from the Gmax Listener and converts it to a XML format.
Finally you need Yafray, this converts XML scene renders into a visable *.tga image, the above takes about 30 seconds to compile, the Yafray takes longer to convert a XML to *.tga, for the 800x600 images above then Yafray takes a good 10 mins to do the conversion, for a 1200x800, it'd probably take 30mins.
It's mind numbingly slow and you only know it ifs ok when its finished, the Warship wasnt set up for rendering last night so setting the scene for that one shot, with lights and trial and error took 3-4 hrs work, now the scene is set it was a case of deleting the Warship, adding the Class 26, rotating the camera and grabbing the scene, took about 60mins to do that one.
You can speed it up by getting it to render a small 300x150 thumbnail to see if light levels and camera angles are good, takes anout 4 mins to render that in Yafray.
Most Yafray work is automatic, simply drag the XML file over the Yafray.exe file in file manager and it will spit out the final result, Yafray is basically a Dos based utility so you can run from dos to see where it failed, as the auto route just opens a Dos window whilst compiling, once completed it auto closes, failed or not !.
Very compilcated, very very time consuming but dammed god results IMHO, just need to find time to do more experimenting. One of the problems with this rendering method is that it will only render textures in *.tga format, so for all train sim models you need to alter all the textures from *.ace to *.tga, for plane sim you need to alter all *.bmp to *.tga, only then will YaGmax and Yafray compile correctly.
What l'm doing now is making all models with *.tga textures for the future, no one knows what the new sims formats will be but by opting for *.tga you retain good rendering and its easy to convert later, both TGATools and DXTBmp will convert from *.tga to the correct formats for each sim.
Gmax has a nice option to retain all mapping but just alter the file input type, by using the material navigator its a very easy task to simply change the texture input path from *.tga to *.ace or *.bmp with a few clicks, no need to remap or re texture, just click and swap, very handy for hedging your bets on future builds.
Hope that helps
Best regards
Michael
