I wasn't sure about the black when you first made that change, but it's really starting to grow on me. Throw some flame decals on it, too!
I love the ship as a whole, but I am getting a slight vacuum cleaner attachment vibe from those cannons, specifically the way the opening leans forward past the saucer rim. Like the crew clips that part on to get into those tough to reach places.
Well, I'm tackling the underside of the primary hull in earnest now. There are about a dozen separate pieces down there, all of which need to be frozen, optimized and seamlessly stitched together before I can proceed with detailing such things as the gridlines. I've worked on it for 5 or 6 hours today and I'd say I'm somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the way there. Very meticulous, very tedious work. Should have some more WIPs posted by tomorrow night.
Sorry, no new posts for the weekend. I'm still working on cleaning up all those parts on the lower primary hull and there's just not much new to look at. I'm gonna be very busy at work this week and out of town for part of it, so probably no more WIPs until next weekend.
So, it's been just over a month with no new updates and I thought I ought to let everyone know what's going on. A few weeks ago, the power supply on my 3D modeling rig died. I managed to replace it fairly quickly but then discovered both the motherboard and graphics card had taken a hit as well. In short, I'm having to rebuild almost the entire rig, and doing it in one shot was simply not in the budget. The good news is, the contents of the hard drive appear to be fully intact, and I hope to have things up and running again shortly. Stay tuned.
And if your HDD had died, you had everything backed up... right? Back your stuff up, guys. This PSA was brought to you by someone who didn't, many years ago, and learned that lesson the hard way.
I spent most of the weekend--and about $400--rebuilding and resurrecting my workstation. I wound up replacing both the graphics card and the power supply. It didn't want to recognize the RAID array at first and I fussed with it until the wee morning hours on Sunday until I finally discovered one of the dang SATA cables was loose. I spent the rest of the weekend doing a thorough spring cleaning, tearing apart most of my computers and electronics to rearrange stuff, reorganize cabling, blow out dust, etc. I've got more work to do before some relatives arrive in town tomorrow and I'll probably be busy through Wednesday, but I should be able to resume work on the Grandeur by Thursday evening and deliver some new WIP images by next Sunday night.
Awesome news! I've had similar experiences with SATA cables. I even went so far as to start a RMA with the company I purchased my mother board from until I discovered the problem. I felt like a complete when I had to contact the company to cancel the RMA. Can't wait for the new renders!
No new WIPs tonight. I spent most of the day trying to clean up and stitch together all the pieces on the underside of the primary hull and I'm still not finished. I could run a couple of renders but they wouldn't really look any different from the last ones. I'm off tomorrow for Memorial Day and hopefully I will get a chance to finish the cleanup so I can cut in the lower gridlines, but at this point I'd say it's about 50/50 that any new WIPs will get posted before Tuesday or Wednesday.
Well, it's not particularly eye-catching, but here are some wireframes to show a little bit of what I'm working on to try to patch together the various pieces of the aft and lower primary hull: Basically, I'm cleaning up and optimizing the meshes as I go, then meticulously aligning the edges, matching the number of segments, etc, one vertex and/or edge loop at a time in some cases. I have to carve out the overlapping polygons and eventually weld the pieces together into a contiguous whole. The last rendering shows all the stuff in yellow, which has more or less been completed, and the parts in teal, which are still very much a work in progress. Eventually the teal, yellow, purple and blue will all be welded together into a single piece. Then I can start cutting in the lower gridlines and other details. I'm hoping to finish the clean-up by Friday-ish and then start making progress on the gridlines over the weekend.
Still working on clean-up before proceeding to the lower gridlines. I have managed to align pretty much all of the geometry between parts and am now just working through them to optimize and reduce poly count. Further updates will be a bit sketchy over the next couple of weeks. I will try to post them when I can but I'm going to be VERY busy with some major work being done on my house through the end of next week. Stay tuned.