Just a quickie for today. The exterior of the secondary hull is finally finished, and I revised (again!) the “Christmas lights” visual effect behind the domes at the front of the warp nacelles. Judging by this test clip, I still need to do a little tweaking on the brightness and color saturation of the lights. … [Read more…]
Busy week at work and some personal life stuff, so not a lot of progress this week. Materials for the secondary hull exterior are completed. I’m still working on adjusting the lighting for the interiors that are visible through the portholes; that’s going to take a while (there are a lot of portholes!). I also … [Read more…]
I spent the weekend visiting friends I haven’t seen in years, and it wasn’t until I was on the plane home this evening that I realized Sunday was Star Trek day. Fifty-three years ago on September 8, 1966, the little science fiction show that could premiered on NBC. So, here’s a picture to celebrate the … [Read more…]
Spent most of yesterday evening tracking down a lighting artifact that was manifesting itself as a leak of “radiation” from the impulse engines. OctaneRender is forgiving, but only to a point… the culprit was a couple of n-gons (polygons with more than four vertices) that were also light emitters. Unfortunately, they were not only projecting … [Read more…]
Happy Labor Day to U.S. visitors… I’ve been laboring. The Enterprise primary hull is now completely finished top-to-bottom and inside-out. Now it’s onto the rest of the ship, which I hope won’t take all fall the way that summer disappeared while working on the saucer section.
A quickie for the Labor Day weekend: a peek through the portholes into Kirk’s quarters. On the right is his desk, where our gallant captain knocked back more than a few with Bones after a long day at the office. On the left you can see the edge of Kirk’s bunk, where our favorite spacegoing … [Read more…]
Do you remember that scene near the end of Airplane! where Lloyd Bridges (whose character picked the wrong day to quit sniffing glue) sees the stricken 707 coming in for a landing and screams “He’s coming right at us!” Yeah, that’s what I was going for here. Modeling on the lower primary hull is completed, … [Read more…]
Modeling on the upper primary hull is finally finished! Here’s a quickie test video. The main updates to look for here are the little tiny static (non-blinking) outboard running lights, a test of a revised Bussard Collector effect on the starboard nacelle, and the completed grid system on the upper primary hull. Those razor-thin grid … [Read more…]
The Enterprise is not quite ready for her closeup, but I needed to zoom in from all angles to survey the ship and compile a punch list of everything that remains to be done on the model. I’ve provided three file sizes below; small, medium, and ginormous—and I do mean ginormous; the full-size image is … [Read more…]
Or “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Gloss” I can’t seem to stop fiddlin’ with the materials on the upper primary hull, but I *think* this is the right balance of shiny/dirty/glossy/not glossy. I think the main reason I keep dithering is because I know, deep down, that once I commit to … [Read more…]