Getting a little closer to the look I’ve been searching for. The pig smells his truffles and is zeroing in on his reward.
Other than a slew of lighting adjustments, this update has several minor (and not-so minor) modifications to the model/scene configuration:
- Adjusted the gamma on the star background to help the foreground blend in better. (Once I finish working on—ahem!—another model needed for this show, the backgrounds won’t be quite as boring.)
- Upped the lower bound threshold for glare and bloom on foreground objects. Point lights on the Enterprise still have a nice glow, but indirect light bouncing off the hull has a much lower bloom than before. (Side benefit: the actinic phaser bolts stand even more.)
- Discovered that the brushed metal diffuse map was being used instead of the brushed metal normal map on the Normal channel for most of the secondary hull surfaces; fixed that.
- Added a new metallic mesh surface material to the warp drive Bussard collectors. Not precisely (or at all) canon, but it gives some visual interest to those huge (and otherwise featureless) domes when motion blur isn’t obscuring the detail, and it adds that last bit of light refraction and dispersion that I couldn’t quite achieve with glass material alone. I think this is the closest that I’ve come to replicating the look of the original warp effect.
