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…]
Work in progress #13 shows the Enterprise sporting what I hope is her final coating for the upper primary hull.
The Enterprise gets her base coat of paint, and it’s green.
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…]