Great work!
I have to say it's probably my least favourite set on that ship. The TMP set just looks completely at odds with the rest of the set design. Even main engineering doesn't have that kind of exposed machinery, just the magical, swirling main shaft.
It's like a set from an Alien movie. It's cool, but it's not very Star Trek. I liked it better in TFF and TUC.
I agree. It contrasts heavily with what we see of the rest of the ship. I'd have to say, my favorite iteration of this transporter room set is probably the Voyager transporter, but a close second would be the TUC transporter.
Keeping in mind that my knowledge of 3D modeling is, well, non-existent, is the grating modeled so there are holes where the empty spaces would be, or is there some kind of translucence going on so you can still see the machinery through the grating?
When it comes to games, most grating materials use opacity maps which dictate which pixels are transparent and which are opaque, or anywhere in between. My floor grating material seen above employs the following textures:
1) a diffuse map (base color)
2) a normal map (faking lighting and details that aren't actually modeled into the geometry)
3) a metallic map (how metallic the pixels should be)
4) a roughness map (how rough/smooth the pixels should be)
5) an ambient occlusion map (ambient light shadowing)
6) an opacity map (how transparent the pixels should be)
7) a displacement map (controls how raised or lowered the pixels should be off the source geometry)
All of these maps are put into a set of instructions (which is the material itself) which tells the game engine how to render the textures. FYI, most of my materials employ the first 5 of those. It's only in special cases that I have to generate opacity or displacement maps.
Just incredible work, Donny. I wish I had the time to devote to my art the way you do yours.
Are you using HDRs at all in your lighting? Global illumination, or something else?
Lastly, have you considered doing tutorials for any of your pieces? Like, maybe ,oh, I don't know, the Galileo shuttlecraft? ; )
I use global illumination with all my renders. Unreal's global illumination is "baked" onto the surfaces through their method called lightmass . However, the newest version of the Unreal engine supports raytracing, which would therefore allow real-time global illumination, but I have yet to tinker with that. As far as other things like HDR, Unreal employs an entire host of lighting techniques, and I usually use several of them in any given situation. If you want more info, you can peruse this wiki:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Engine/Rendering/LightingAndShadows
As far as tutorials go? Making tutorials would be yet another timesink involved in making these projects, and I think I'd just rather use the time to keep building environments rather than taking the extra time to set up tutorials. Maybe one day I'll do a tutorial on making a small prop, but an entire environment or ship in which I usually spend a month or more on wouldn't be feasible. I'm also not the best as explaining my processes, to be honest. I dunno. I'll think about it
