Celestia Forums

I was using CHview to map out the galaxy as seen through the focus of a sci-fi story line I'm developing, but Celestia will enable me to (hopefully) create teh various systems my stories depend on.

If there is a thread that will point me to how to create and edit systems around specific stars, I'd apreachiate a pointer to it.

And I do a bit of modeling in various mediums and am quite happy to share various sci-fi craft I've got - But what format? 3DS, Obj... I can do several and only need to know what people want to use.

BTW - I use phpBB myself. Great choice.

Hi Ikyoto

Celestia uses 3DS models.

What is phpBB ?

Jens

3ds - cool. Now all I need to do is the following:

Get Celestia to NOT cause my Windows 2000 pro machine to reboot when i shut it down, and
Find out how to create systems around other stars.

phpBB is the software that runs this very forum. It's HIGHLY "administrator freindly" and free. I use it for a forum for my wife's site and one on a intranet for the school sytem I teach for.

As for the models, I'm doing things with an eye towards scienctific plausibility. My stations use centrifical force and are constructed with the required center of mass and symetry.. that kind of stuff. As soon as I have a few to share I'll post a notice (and link) here.

basicly any kind of space craft model would go down well here
be it star wars, star trek, and so on. there would br someone on her that would like it

But any of the realistic space probes, satalites, or craft would be your best bet

there have been calls for lots of the models we dont have.
such a Pioneer 10 / 11, Ulyses, DeepSpace, Near..... and so on

or even better versions of models we already have

Looking forward to nice new models.

Is there anything that will create 3ds models, that you dont have to pay for...?! anything at all?!

Jack,

There are at least a half-dozen.
Some are listed at http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/index.html#8.1

I don't know of any free ones, but Rhino is fairly affordable if you can get a student ID and it exports 3ds without a problem.

and 3D Cafehas a HUGE library of stuff. Not all of it is 3DS, but alot is.

Hello Jack... there's Amapi 3d currently available as a cover disk on alot of mags at the moment, also Anim8tor is free off the web (search google). I like Bryce but I've only got Bryce 3D which doesn't export to 3ds (I think). I don't know if you can get Bryce 5 for free. I would like it to finish off some of the shuttle details, thrusters ect.

For the shuttle mods I used Amapi, Anim8tor and Deep Exploration (which is great). I hope to get the doors closed when I've finished the shallow water texture.

Regards...bh.

Bryce isn't very good as a modeling tool (though within it's own "world" you can achieve some fantastic results).

I'd forgotten about Amapi, but the learning curve is rather out of this lazy modeler's range of effort

And just to be a nag - I've found some good resources for adding planets to a star system, but I need to add a few stars into the app - the list in it is great, but there are several hundred stars withing 50 LY of Sol that are not in it that I really need for the story line.

Any suggestions?