Project:
After a brief hiatus due to (all important) work, I’m back on the “Enterprise-U” project – the above render reveals a lot of detail which will be more apparent when I render some close-up views – for now it’s just to give me some idea of the direction it going in.
I’ve added some additional details, like the “sensor” on the main dish underside, a shuttle bay landing light (just about visible here) and the nacelle covers, which I’ve still to tweak – the main addition is the blue illuminated insert in the front of the lower hull – what was originally some kind of sensor array / dish in the OS and later Enterprise iterations.
Both the dish “sensor” (or whatever it is…) and the shuttle bay landing light are second attempts after previous attempts were too clunky and not in keeping with the overall elegant lines I am aiming for – it’s actually very easy to fall into the trap of modelling “spacecraft” type detailing which might look interesting intrinsically, but doesn’t fit with a particular scheme.
Panel details can be seen here, but I’m well aware that, especially on the pylon section, they may be too obvious, which tends to affect the overall sense of scale, so I’ll be tweaking these.
The lighting elements are a result of the radiosity shader, which means that geometry can actually be set up to emit light on surrounding surfaces in a realistic way.
I’m still happier with some of the earlier renders in terms of the tone & lighting quality, and so it will now be a case of adding more or less detail and adjusting the surface characteristics to bring it back, or somewhere close to those renders – again overly visible detailing seems to create a sense of small rather than big scale.
On another point I’ve started to think about how the Enterprise Shuttle might look, given the retro-makeover – so this might be my next project, alongside looking at the interior and bridge section.