trueSpace Tutorials

Tutorials

Welcome to my trueSpace tutorials page. This page will contain a variety of tutorials, hints & tips for truespace. At the moment there's only one tutorial detailing the basics of using primitives and texturing.

Creating water and sky.

This tutorial was written for trueSpace 2 but the icons are similar in other versions of trueSpace.

Make sure you're starting with a blank scene (select file:scene:new from the menu bar if you're not) and add a plane from the primitives panel.
Click on the primitives icon to bring up the primitives panel and select the plane icon from that panel.

You should now have something like this.

This plane is a bit small for our needs so we're going to stretch it a little. Select the object scale icon

then click of hold on the plane and use the mouse to stretch it in X and Y. Play around with the tool to see how it works and once you're finished release the mouse button. Another, more accurate way to resize objects is to right click on the object tool icon

which will bring up the object panel

as you can see my plane is 8000 units by 8000 units, make yours the same by clicking in the correct box and typing in the value then close the object panel.

Next we're going to add some texture to the plane, if the various material and shader panels aren't visible, bring them up by right clicking on the paint face icon

. In the shader/maps panel

right click on the bump maps icon

to bring up the bump map panel

. Click on the get bump map button

this brings up a file requester which allows you to select the bump map you want to use. trueSpace comes with a variety of bump maps, the one I've used is wave.tab, you can download a zipped version here wave.zip (60k) if you wish.

Having selected the bump map you can now play around with the settings. The Amp setting varies the amplitude of the bump map, the higher the value the greater the difference between the lowest point and highest point of the bump map, set this to 0.17. The U and V settings allow you to vary the number of repetitions of the bump map; the U setting adjusts the number of repeats in the X plane and the V setting adjusts the number of repeats in the Y plane, set them both to 10.

Now close the bump map panel and left click on the bump maps icon

, the material panel

should now show the bump mapped material.
Click on the paint face icon

and then click on the plane that you created earlier and voila, a bump mapped plane that looks a little like this:

Now we're going to add a sky, start by clicking the cone icon

in the primitives panel. Resize the cone so that its size is 8000 in X, 8000 in Y and 2000 in Z and its position is 0 in X, 0 in Y and 950 in Z.
We now have to texture map the cone, first click on the bump map button to deselect it. Sky can be textured in a variety of ways, a straight texture map may be added by right clicking the texture map button

and using the file requestor to select an appropriate texture map in exactly the same manner as we selected a bump map or we can use trueSpace's built in textures, this is the method we're going to use here.

Right click the procedural marble icon

to bring up the marble settings panel

this panel allows you to adjust the settings for the marble texture, click on the procedural marble icon

to enable it and play with the settings to see how the material varies with the values. When you're finished playing around click on the coloured button next to the stonecol label, this brings up the marble stone colour panel

this allows you to adjust the colour of the stone, the intesity of the colour and the transparency of the colour. Right click on the big coloured hexagon in the stone colour panel to bring up a panel with 3 colour bars

set the red, green and blue values to 1, 25 and 248 respectively, close the colour bar panel and stone colour panel and repeat the process with the vein colour, this time setting red, green and blue to 181, 193 and 229 respectively.

In the marble settings panel, set the turbulence value to 5, the sharpness to 0.34, change the grain to X and set all three scale values to 3. Select the cone you created by clicking on it and then select the paint object icon

, this is usually selected by clicking and holding on the paint face icon

and selecting the paint object icon from the pop up menu. Close the marble texture panel. Your scene hopefully now looks something like this:

We now have to adjust the lighting, delete all but one of the existing lights and move the remaining light to X=0, Y=0 and Z=1000 (the position of lights is adjusted in the same way as the position of the cone). Adjust the colour of the light using the lights panel that appears when you click on the light, set the colour to something in the light blue end of the spectrum and set the intesnsity to about 2/3 of maximum.

We now have to move the viewing position so that we're inside the cone. Using the eye move tools

move down until the eye is almost level with the plane, then move forward until the eye is within the cone and finally rotate upwards until the view is about halfway up the side of the cone. The view should look similar to this:

Now click on the render button

and watch your scene unfold before your eyes. Hopefully it'll look like this:

Experiment with the viewing position, pan around, move in and out, if the view renders as a black scren then you've moved outside the cone. Try altering some of the other material settings; shininess, ambient glow etc for both the cone and the plane and see how it affects the overall picture. Try changing the colour of the water, the sky and even the light. Above all experiment.

If you create a material you particularly like you can add it to a material library by clicking on the add icon

in the material library panel.
That's it, happy rendering.

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Any comments? Mail me. rrob@blueyonder.co.uk