The Explorer 3000 is an exploration vehicle designed for use on alien planets.
It looks like this:
It’s also available at 1024x768:
Here
Ok, it’s not brilliant.
Even so, positive suggestions are welcome.
The modelling is ok… whats missing is proper lighting, and shadows…
Well… there is a neat trick for easy lighting: Ambient Oclusion.
You’ll find it in the ‘World Buttons’.
Just activate it, and press hte button ‘both’ (so that AO lightens AND darkens your scene)
Don’t foget to activate raytracing. (the RAY button in the render settings)
Now just render, wait ages for the rendering to complete, and say wow! 
better lighting would definitely help but also the terrain looks really smooth and monotonous and boring. use a displacement map on it and try modeling some interesting features like some interesting cliffs or rock pillars, for example.
good start.
tom
Ok…
Raytracing is on, the window is meant to reflect.
The terrain was based on a tutorial, I used the gimp to generate a random height map and used a bit of proportional editing to make the ground flatter. I will create some more interesting terrain, but that will be later when I have made a load more models in this universe.
I will try AO, I’ve never used it before.
Thanks for the advice.
Right, rendered it with AO.
Still need to work on the terrain, no modifications yet.
And I just realized that the terrain doesn’t join to the ground properly - hence the ugly gap.
Again, for those silly enough to use it as their desktop:
1024x768
Again, suggestions welcome - I expect my lighting is still rubbish, AO or not.
