Wow, this is really starting to come along well. It has been a pleasure, seeing you start with just laying out the hull components, to starting to laying out all the details.
They are there mostly to give people a sense of scale but I do use them to determine spacing around hatchways interiors and the like, anything that is a person machine interface. Decks often are paced by a grid array behind the ship. But I rarely use it anymore as I picture ships more akin to a multi level house now and do not see the use of it as much as I had in the past short of counting up decks in a rough manner for bean counters. IE ship is X# of decks high and so on. The people though remain a static 5'10" so they are a but irregular for aliens but I want to retain a consistent sampler. As for keeping features in scale I always block models out then incrementally detail down. Might not be the best method as I do rebuild things often as I change my mind or find a better way to do something. But in general I have not come across issues unless I goof in the block in phase IE spaces that are too small to service crew or allow required internal gubbins.
Looks really great. The only possible gripe is that the long boom is a bit sterile. You might place some wedge shaped spikes along either side...say...two-thirds of the way down. Something to break up the look?
Very nice, but I have to second the long neck issue. From a Klingon-ish warship point-of-view, what purpose does the long neck serve? Does it offer a tactical advantage or is it a disadvantage. Maybe beefing up the engineering hull more will balance it out? Just my 5 cents... (we got rid of the penny in Canada, so I have to give out nickles now...sigh!)
Working in some of the detail work on the neck back. Not happy with the TNGish look to it so I am breaking it up some with trenches and likely going to pull panels in places to create greeb pits. and as I look at pre TNG stuff most of the parts are very large unified lumps of stuff. I had considered making this upper neck area just a mangle of crap and pipes as this area will not have any sort of habitable bits in it, but I am thinking the central bit of hull might get broken up more ATM it is all subD. Only the central flare will contain livable decks. Along that area will be crew berths. IE little slots in the wall to sleep in flanked by halls. I might have a second deck with passage as well so that spacing a deck wont isolate the neck to the aft sections. I also have to deal with how the AO shaders are bugging out on some of the optimizations. I am wondering if I am not getting some poly face twist as the neck flares out. Kinda funny the scale when you stick a 214m ktinga in there.
Working the bottom and the forward bits of the sternum like bulkhead. I think I had a mess of other things done too that I never bothered posting too.
Added a poop shute, mess of gubbins merged up a mess of crap adjusted some bits and fooled with the textures making the thing take forever to render so I will have to go in and adjust stuff to correct that likely will have to ditch the AO shaders at this point. Ignore obvious uvw vomit or puke caused my mirroring of objects.
The off-set bridge tower makes me all tingly in my naughty-bits because asymmetrical designs please me.
Do not hope too hard as I do not do orthos anymore as ones I have made in the past were abused. More collapsing of subdiv objects for detailing passes and or optimization. Been kinda slow going, dunno why. heh. Resisted the urge to do the bluegreen plasma in those vents. I am still debating how I will detail up those nacelle struts or if I will keep them a simple object. adding vs bumping the thread Figured I should show a better close up of the bits. Not that happy with the forward hole so I might mess about with this bits later on.
Not a real huge update mostly small this and that and some bits I forget to position to show what was done. I decided I should get back to the Enterprise as I have been chickening out on working on it. I also forgot to turn the AO layer back on in the composite. It does show off the modeling a bit better. Plan is to replace it with bitmaps later on to save render time. THAT will be a nightmare to do on this model. Likely will merge up a bunch of the objects and uvw them all as a large part. I probably should look at doing a new paint over to plan things out some more
More panels and new lower flaps or whatever they would be heh. Still a load to work out on the bottom.