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Originally posted by Kame:
**You can't apply anti-aliasing to the mask. Anti-aliasing uses a range of colors and shades to smooth the edges of images and text so that is fades slightly into the background. The masks are in bitmap format so only black and white is allowed - or more accurately, the mask is either on or off. There can be no range of slightly on.

**

My experiences have shown that Nova treats non-white pixels as part of the mask. It only shows the portions of the ship that are in the white part of the mask. Kate, you could try opening the mask PICT in Photoshop, and use the color change tool. Click on the black area of the mask, with a fill color of black. This will make the white space of the ship about one pixel smaller. If you are really paranoid, you can use the threshold tool to make it 100% b&w.;

As for problem number one, you could try my technique for making engine flares in Strata. What I do is make the ship and the glow in the same file, and use hiding and textures to only render what parts of the ship you need. Follow these steps:

Create the model and engine flare in the same model.

Group the base ship and the flare in two different groups.

Group these two groups together.

Now set up the rotation for the ship, as you read in Jules' tutorial.

Create a new surface texture (I call it "null") with 0% ambience and 0% diffusion. This will make the object completely black, so it properly "cuts out" the part of the flare that is behind the ship.

Apply this texture to the ship group, inside of the main group.

Render the model. This is the flare picture.

Now, select the ship group, and in the object properties palette, under textures (advanced), delete the "null" texture from the ship.

Next, under the Project palette, select the flare group, and click on the little eye icon. This will hide the flare.

Finally, render the model again, which shall be the main ship.

Make sure the two images are exactly the same size, as scaling sometimes throws things off. Also, to get the angle perfect, try using a camera, positioned behind your ship, and have it point to the center of your model. Under the camera's object properties, you can make the image a perfect square. Just double-click on the camera from the project palette, and render from that window.

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Topics created by Kate