This image was in essence impossible before the soft shadows option available in C3. The GI stuff is also working significantly better. -Kix

wow..very nice model

Very good work Kix I like the details and the soft shadows.

The heck with the renderer the MODEL is great!

Here's an image of the back. -Kix

Beautiful work, are you planning on texturing it?

Wow! Where did you get a photo from a long time ago... in a galaxy far, far away...?

I'm still using C1.1. What is the difference in the soft shadows from that version to 3? I agree with all comments here, what a cool model. memaci

Robert, Believe it or not, This model is textured. Imperial stuff is all cold, black, and white. Memaci, Here's the same image rerendered with everything set up like it was C1.1 EXCEPT that I added three more lights to fake the radiosity of the floor, body, and side wings. There are two things that should pop out concerning the shadows. 1.) The big shadow of the wing on the right hand side of the image is sharper where the edge of the wing is closer to the floor (correctly rendered) whereas the C1 shadow is uniform across the horizon edge. 2.) The soft shadow setup in C1 would not cast a shadow on a surface unless the surface was a certain distance away from the horizon edge (edge of the thing casting the shadow). If you look at the wing spars in the C1 image, you can see how the shadows are more "ghosty" and the edges of objects are poorly represented. This could be adjusted with the bias in the C1 and C2 shadow models but when set to 0, all kinds of incorrect artifacts surface. This is a nitpick for me but it drives me absolutely NUTS! It's big time intrusive on some images and was such an issue before C3 that I haven't done a lot of work I personally considered out of reach for Carrara. Just for this one stupid issue. While I've faked the radiosity, it's still not near as good as the C3 image. C2 could probably pull this off pretty dang close but the controls in C3 just seem better and the results are better (at least from what I can tell from the tests I've run). Don't really know if they changed it but truth is in the eye of the beholder. -Kix

Here's the same image with no soft shadowing, no radiosity faking or GI and the ambient light turned up. It renders fast but it definitely loses realistic effects. -Kix

now if YOU can become one of america's richest men like the dude that come up with this... :P very sweet model is this a c3 native model? BT

It was originally contructed in Raydream and has been tweaked in C as time has passed. So in that sense, yes, it's a C3 native. -Kix