Minor update.
I could not let the bussard issue go. It bothered me so I played around more with textures and even a meshed version. I landed on a blended texture that I am happy with. The next update will likely (hopefully) be the final product.
Really. Honest…
Been some time since my last update though I have continued to work on the ship. I have run into an issue with the texturing of the bussard collectors. The elongated nature of the dome is causing a stretching of the texture that I cannot compensate for (at the moment). Due to the old version of MAX I have I cannot put glowing orbs behind a transparent item. While there is a control for it that feature never worked until later releases. I wanted to try and keep the final product in line with other ships I have done for a project.
Thinking…
Updates:
Not much to say (to the relief of you all).
Had a few moments to clone a few parts and light up the windows / ports. First pass nacelle textures as well. All keeping as close to the museum schematic of course.
I wasted spent some time on an accompanying object that I hope to use in the scene(s) with this. I slowed my self down a bit on this project.
Just the one update image.
I try so hard to be witty. Sorry.
I have had this Museum model of the Horizon class explorer laying around for some time now. I built it out the day Masao released the site update but never textured it. Sad.
Of course I have a need for it now and, so, it is in the ‘paint booth’ for color. Just a few quick looks at some of the parts with diffuse maps applied. Trying to do this with fewest maps I can. So far so good. Hopefully this won’t take very long.
While putting together the task force render (previous post) I had a bunch of free time. My render / 3D station is old and is known to crash while doing big renders so I had to babysit it. And, due to an error on my part, the renders ran exceptionally longer than they should have. I got bored and opened up Wings3D which is on a thumb drive and can run anywhere. I love to mesh-doodle (I’m calling that BTW) as it is so fast and easy to do in Wings. Oddly, I came up with two whole new projects! One I definitely will be finishing and one I’ll noodle over.
The keeper – Gorn Battle Cruiser
I always wanted a big Gorn ship and built an Atolm (Chris Reyes) design some years back. Oddly, the one I picked was actually a mashup he did from other designs and not his favorite. He was kind enough to help create textures for it though. Any ways. I have his designs stored away in a work file and have seen various other versions designed by folks over at DeviantArt and the web. This version ‘borrows’ from many of those approaches but is my interpretation. The one canon version out there I don’t like so choose to ignore🙂.
The ‘have to think about’ is another Atolm inspired design.
He did a couple of designs with torus style hulls and I always liked them. I doodle (in Wings) ships like them on and off. This one I saved. I need to come up with a ‘main’ hull that will incorporate the impulse engines and other doodads. Again, have to think about it.
Meaning I got around to creating an image with that updated Conqueror!
A fair bit of drama on this as my poor old rendering station ran into an issue when I created this. I mistakenly set up a key light in MAX (very old version) that provided light to all the ships. The light was huge. Each pass took about 12 hours. Had I just set up key lights for each object I would have shortened each pass to about 15 minutes.
Sigh.
Here is a ‘wallpaper’ version of the image. I reduced it from 2048×1536 pixels and then cropped it to 1920×1200.
I believe I am now finished with the fixes to the mesh and the textures. The ships bussards are crap so they will get redone in final scenes. I think I’ll go with a more ‘ST-Enterprise’ type red with the fractal noise pattern. The bussards also get done in post and these images are single pass renders.
Now, on to scenes! (?)🙂
Plugging away on texture recreation for the Conqueror. Have my hull textures (mostly) done. The bump and specular maps as well. A few slight adds likely needed and then on to the nacelles and turrets. I might even be able to create a scene or two.
