Get ready for the understatement of the century: It’s been a weird 18 months. But I’m still here, and this project ain’t dead yet! This is a still of the shuttlecraft Winfield making a hasty exit from the Enterprise hangar deck. The deck sports its shortened-length so that the back wall and the enclosed elevated … [Read more…]
Enhance… …zoom in and enhance… …enhance… …zoom in and enhance. Yeeeah, I may have gone a bit overboard with the interiors.
Hi everyone! Nope, not dead yet! But as far as I’m concerned, LightWave is. Â I’ve been gone for a while with no updates, so I thought I’d punch in and let you know what’s going on. After six months of battle, tonight I finally came to the frustrating conclusion that LightWave 2019 is irretrievably … [Read more…]
After a much-needed three weeks off I’m back in the saddle. The model as shown in this image does not include any new features compared to WIP video #121-A from three weeks ago; it’s just a test image that I rendered to reacquaint myself with the Enterprise model and see what’s left to do. Click … [Read more…]
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…]
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…]
Work in progress #13 shows the Enterprise sporting what I hope is her final coating for the upper primary hull.
I’ve joined the GPU rendering revolution. This 384-frame 1080p HD sequence took 87 minutes to render on my workstation using its GPU and OTOY OctaneRender for LightWave. This same sequence in 480p (DVD quality) would probably have taken over 87 hours back in 2008 on my four render computers chipping away at the pixels with … [Read more…]