Cargo-Art for Dilithium

To Megatherion · Post by **To Megatherion** » Sat Apr 29, 2006 10:14 am

I just made two similar graphics for Dilithium. Staying true to the description it is "not particularly exciting". However, I tried to stay true to the structure of actual dilithium telluride:

What do you think?

Oblivion · Post by **Oblivion** » Sat Apr 29, 2006 11:37 am

Wouldn't know how Dilithium telluride looks. But I think , sorry

, it's awfully pixelated.

To Megatherion · Post by **To Megatherion** » Sat Apr 29, 2006 12:52 pm

It IS pixelated in reality...
Well, of course not. Now that you mention it.
Perhaps I shouldn't have compressed the png. so much. I resized the pics from 1024Â², perhaps that did some additional pixelating?

Zeog · Post by **Zeog** » Sat Apr 29, 2006 2:55 pm

Hmm, maybe a bit more exciting wouldn't hurt too much. These white things could be anything. Maybe a close-up could reveal more, some dispersion and caustics? I did a quick sample to illustrate what I mean:

To Megatherion · Post by **To Megatherion** » Sat Apr 29, 2006 5:31 pm

Well, that looks a bit nicer I must admit. But the colour is not correct since the stuff is white or if not 100% pure slightly amber. But I guess the stuff Trekkies would go for is the stuff they'd use in the warpdrive and I assume this should be pure.
Unfortunately I dunno how to make it look more like a real crystal...which software do you use?

Halleck · Post by **Halleck** » Sat Apr 29, 2006 5:59 pm

I think the "pixellation" problem is probably due to lack of antiailiasing.

Zeog · Post by **Zeog** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 4:50 pm

To Megatherion wrote:Well, that looks a bit nicer I must admit. But the colour is not correct since the stuff is white or if not 100% pure slightly amber. But I guess the stuff Trekkies would go for is the stuff they'd use in the warpdrive and I assume this should be pure.

Well then, a white version:

and a light amber one:

In white it doesn't look as spectacular, though.
What is the structure of dilithium telluride you were talking about? It's hard to see on your pictures. Hexagonal and somewhat flattened, I presume?

To Megatherion wrote:Unfortunately I dunno how to make it look more like a real crystal...which software do you use?

The sooo ugly one: Blender

Sunfire · Post by **Sunfire** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 7:16 pm

you can find out some stuff about dilithium
here
they dont have any real life pictures, but they do have the crystal structure and some other info (like where it comes from)

Post by **klauss** » Mon May 01, 2006 7:15 am

Ehm... wasn't dilithium fictional?

AFAIK, lithium is a metal... no crystalline structure... and according to the wikipedia, there's no pure form found in nature. (di-lithium would be one such pure form).

In any case, neither you could make pure di-lithium: as all metals, they bind in a metallic way, so just like you don't have Fe2, or Na2, you neither have Li2. You could create Ionized cristalline componds, but Li-Li - no, not that, not with any techinque I know (which isn't much to say, I'll grant you that).

Sunfire · Post by **Sunfire** » Mon May 01, 2006 8:12 am

klauss wrote:Ehm... wasn't dilithium fictional?

AFAIK, lithium is a metal... no crystalline structure... and according to the wikipedia, there's no pure form found in nature. (di-lithium would be one such pure form).

In any case, neither you could make pure di-lithium: as all metals, they bind in a metallic way, so just like you don't have Fe2, or Na2, you neither have Li2. You could create Ionized cristalline componds, but Li-Li - no, not that, not with any techinque I know (which isn't much to say, I'll grant you that).

dilithium crystals fueling the warp drive... yes exceedingly fictional

yes, lithium is a very soft metal (makes a good addive to grease) somewhere buried in teh back of my mind is all the periodic info on lithium... but um... i thnk the hrd dfrive has bad sectrs on itd

lithium is also helpful in keeping some ppl from killing themselves...

dilithium telluride (Li2Te) however, would be a mineral with a crystaline structure... too bad natural chemistry on earth pretty much rules out the possibility of finding it in your backyard

oh... and it looks like the site i linked to cant be brought up anymore... huh... it had a neat picture of a crystal....

Zeog · Post by **Zeog** » Mon May 01, 2006 11:23 am

klauss wrote:AFAIK, lithium is a metal... no crystalline structure... and according to the wikipedia, there's no pure form found in nature. (di-lithium would be one such pure form).

A pure metal is per se of crystaline (regular spacial) structure. But it doesn't have the diamond looks, since the electronic structure causes it to reflect visible light.

klauss wrote:In any case, neither you could make pure di-lithium: as all metals, they bind in a metallic way, so just like you don't have Fe2, or Na2, you neither have Li2. You could create Ionized cristalline componds, but Li-Li - no, not that, not with any techinque I know (which isn't much to say, I'll grant you that).

Hmm, there's a lot of research being done in the area of metal clusters. If you can collect 10^23 atoms for a macroscopic piece of pure metal, why not just 9. Of course, clusters as Na9 for example cannot exist in our atmosphere. One needs to produce them in vacuum or embed them in a noble gas matrix.

see wikipedia for clusters

@sunfire: the links works fine for me, but I didn't want to steal To Megatherion idea! I just wanted to give an example of how a crystal could/should look like in terms of quality.

P.S. Don't have time now... good bye!

Post by **klauss** » Mon May 01, 2006 7:40 pm

Zeog wrote:
klauss wrote:AFAIK, lithium is a metal... no crystalline structure... and according to the wikipedia, there's no pure form found in nature. (di-lithium would be one such pure form).
A pure metal is per se of crystaline (regular spacial) structure. But it doesn't have the diamond looks, since the electronic structure causes it to reflect visible light.

Hm... funny, I always thought of metal bonds as "irregular"... but after reading a bit, more than irregular is "maleable", in that layers have no fixed position and can slide rather freely - that still wouldn't constitute a crystal, and that wouldn't have any crystalline structure, would it?
Anyway... my chemistry is utterly basic, I was just pointing out that you won't find, by any chance, real-life pictures of dilithium.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Mon May 01, 2006 8:47 pm

I think most processed metals are granular, meaning, made up of microscopic metal crystals. Jet engine blades are grown as single metal chrystals, or at least some are, but it's rather expensive to do.
My chemistry is poor too, but I think that knowing the color, whether it's transparent or reflective, and if the former, its dielectric constant, should be enough data for shading it. From the christaline structure, one could try and figure out how the chrystal would break (facet orientations).
Though, it's not necessary that a christal be broken like a jewel, and some won't. Pyrolytic graphite is opaque gray and bends like rubber, yet it's a chrystal.

EDIT:
Ermm.... This PDF shows dilithium chrystals, scroll down half way..

To Megatherion · Post by **To Megatherion** » Fri May 19, 2006 8:02 pm

Yeah, well...since the structure shown here (http://webmineral.com/data/Dilithium.shtml) is only the smallest available structure it's not really necessary to keep it, I mean, not every salt (NaCl) crystal has the shape of a cube. So I guess those Blendered longish crystals are just fine and look way better than mine, especially since Blender seems to be able to do something with the refractive index unlike OpenFX, which I'm using and which doesn't look very impressive. (Yet there's a slight chance of my not using it properly).

Post by **jackS** » Fri May 19, 2006 8:36 pm

another crystal shot appears at http://www.webelements.com/webelements/ ... 36593.html

To Megatherion · Post by **To Megatherion** » Sat May 20, 2006 10:45 am

Right, but it only shows you the grid which won't tell you what a macroscopic crystal would look like. Those elemental cells (Elementarzellen, dunno what it's called in English) are always based on cubes (as on the site you pointed out) and are the smallest unit representing a repeating pattern in the structure (similar to formulas of polymers like polystyrene etc.). Yet one cannot assume that the crystal is cubic because the elemental cell is a cube...else every mineral would be cube-shaped.

Post by **jackS** » Sat May 20, 2006 6:42 pm

good point, my bad.

wtrmute · Post by **wtrmute** » Tue May 23, 2006 8:45 pm

Eh, wasn't it written on top of the lattice representation? The crystalline shape is tetrahedral -- like diamond, IIRC.

I think that kind of quartz-shaped crystal in the models would be more suited to hexagonal crystals, like, um, quartz. And graphite, too, methinks.

antarctic · Post by **antarctic** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 1:59 am

Well, I've done some generic crystal pictures (just different colous from the same template) for the four different types of crystals being used. The original image is in the public domain (from wikipaedia). They're all 128 x 128 PNG's.

Would it be better to have different variations of the same pictures for all the crystals, or completely different images?

Regards

Antarctic

To Megatherion · Post by **To Megatherion** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 1:47 pm

Well, since different crystals crystallize in different shapes, I would recommend several pictures. Colour, of course, should also be correct. No need to make a corundum red or yellow when apparently real corundum is white (or without colour)*.
*Of course you get impure corundum in all colours...Ruby for example is a corundum that has some chromium ions in it.

antarctic · Post by **antarctic** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 2:13 pm

To Megatherion wrote:Well, since different crystals crystallize in different shapes, I would recommend several pictures. Colour, of course, should also be correct. No need to make a corundum red or yellow when apparently real corundum is white (or without colour)*.
*Of course you get impure corundum in all colours...Ruby for example is a corundum that has some chromium ions in it.

You make a good point there, especially with the fact that corundum is a real life crystal (I didn't know this - you learn something new every day), of which we can find photos - I'll have a look into that.
However, I was thinking that the purpose of the pictures is to tell the player what he/she is buying in the trade screens, and to make the UI more interesting - so IMHO having something that is immediately recognisable as a crystal may be more important than having an accurate picture.

Regards

Antarctic

Post by **jackS** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 4:13 pm

antarctic wrote:
To Megatherion wrote:Well, since different crystals crystallize in different shapes, I would recommend several pictures. Colour, of course, should also be correct. No need to make a corundum red or yellow when apparently real corundum is white (or without colour)*.
*Of course you get impure corundum in all colours...Ruby for example is a corundum that has some chromium ions in it.
You make a good point there, especially with the fact that corundum is a real life crystal (I didn't know this - you learn something new every day), of which we can find photos - I'll have a look into that.
However, I was thinking that the purpose of the pictures is to tell the player what he/she is buying in the trade screens, and to make the UI more interesting - so IMHO having something that is immediately recognisable as a crystal may be more important than having an accurate picture.

Regards

Antarctic

That is likewise my general opionion - in the absence of art, a very attractive interim solution would seem to be category based iconongraphy of some sort or another "A is a crystal/gemstone/etc. and B is a weapon and C has something to do with sheep". This is not to say that distinct per-item pictures are in any way undesired, but that A) they will be of more importance when the cargo list itself is less likely to be frequently rewritten and B) the benefit of having a very specific picture over a category picture would seem to be smaller than the benefit of having a category picture over no picture at all.

To Megatherion · Post by **To Megatherion** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 5:42 pm

So you would like a category picture for crystals?
Well, for that purpose those crystal pics above would be quite nice...I mean, everybody can see those are crystals. I especially like the clear one since it doesn't imply it's any special kind of crystal...on the other hand, why not take the colour that goes best with the UI?

antarctic · Post by **antarctic** » Sat Jul 22, 2006 3:38 am

Well, if someone would like to name some colours they want the crystals to be, I'll try my best to make it

.
Also, I was thinking that since there's 4 types of crystals in the game, we can have one colour per crystal.

Regards

To Megatherion · Post by **To Megatherion** » Sat Jul 22, 2006 12:05 pm

Well, here come the colours.
Trilithium (aka Trilithiumnitride) violet (since it is violet)
Dilithium (aka Dilithiumtelluride) amber (actually white, but tends to amber if not 100% pure)
Quartz (aka Silicondioxide) no colour (white translucent)
Corundum (aka Aluminumoxide) whit or red ((synthetic) ruby), blue ((synthetic)sapphire)