Was bored tonight (experimenting with Glow Effects, Aura's & other things)....
Full size 1600x1200
http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a1...dowPursuit.jpg
loaded a shaded model added 2 identical cylinder primitives for the beam, added some glow effects of two colors one for each cylinder, then edited some of the alpha effects with some fractal patterns & settings & what not...
enabled Aura's on both cylinders, to give it that aura effect around the beam, & then
rendered with full ray tracing enabled, AA set at .5 pixel accuracy soft shadows enabled & set to best quality, the scenes lightsource was set to only effect the ship, beam set to not accept shadows itself, etc etc...
took about 2 minutes to render completely, seemed like it was a bit longer, but oh well...
will probably be messing more with special effects & lighting stuff down the road here. (couldn't get it exactly like on the TV series, but oh well, can tinker with it later & figure out how to make it better)
I just need to find a better source of free large resolution (1280x1024 or larger) space, high quality, backdrops, instead of using the same old ones over & over...