The Hotrod competitor to the Constellation and Miranda everyone remembers and misses long after the others became mundane clunkers. I'd love to see her in Ships of the Line. Excellent work Viper!
Would it be possible to get Orthographic views of the final version of the ship ? Great Work by the way
Wonderful ship, I think you took the best elements of the Akira and produced something much more beautiful.
First of all, I'm very happy with how much you like my project This has been quite a long road to get here. Best is yet to come I'll answer a few comments directly below: Thanks dude! Means a lot coming from you @publiusr and @Norsehound, that would be awesome if it happened. I want to do a more complete scene and will try to send it to Doug Drexler Do you mean the blue windows? If so, no. Those are contained to the catamarans. I'll have a garden/arboretum in one side, and a lounge/bar thing on the other. Thanks I'll see about doing some orthos soon. That's quite a compliment. The Akira is one of my favorite designs of all time. My version would not be possible without Alex Yeager's original work
I did some work on the deflector area as well as the deflector itself. I wasn't 100% happy with it yet. Here's a quick render to show it off (Click for 1080p version):
Oh myyyyyyy! She looks predatory from that angle, like a shark on patrol. Exquisite modeling and rendering! I complement you on your lighting technique; I’ve been studying @Donny and yours very closely for inspiration on my own project. Quick question: what is the source of that soft white light that is shining on the aft portion of the inboard starboard warp nacelle? Is that backwash from the impulse engines? Also, is the caustic blur/lens flare that we see in a couple of places (example: the outboard leading edge of the starboard warp nacelle) something that your rendering software is adding automatically, or is that something you are adding in post?
Cheers! That's an angle I worked hard to look good. Some of the early iterations of the secondary hull didn't look good. Both questions have simple answers, but I'll explain the first one a bit more in depth. Forgive me if you know all this, but I thought other folks might find it interesting. I use V-Ray for rendering which, like most modern renderers, uses patch tracing to calculate the light bounces as opposed to the old ray tracing technique. If you search around the web, you'll find tons of papers and videos explaining this, but for our purposes the main difference is that raytracing uses a single bounce for light rays, while path tracing does several. I cooked up this quick scene to explain. The first render is turning off all the bounces, and using only the first one to simulate a raytrace render: In the second one, I enabled the bounces again. You can immediately see the difference: The area underneath the box on the left side is lit and the spheres are coloring the ground due to the bounces. So, hopefully it should be clear where the light on the back of my ship comes from, but if not, the sun light is quite strong and is hitting the port nacellle. The light bounces off from there and hits the starboard nacelle illuminating it. Years ago, this effect would not happen because we were using raytracing engines. As for the flares, V-Ray has a glare tool built in that is quite powerful. It can export the glows/flares in a separate pass to be used in post, but this render was straight off V-Ray with just some color adjustments in Photoshop to get the yellow/blue look.
Something about that deflector... I love it. In a time when the TNG+ deflectors have all manners of bits and bobs in there to make them more complex, a part of me misses the simple effect of a light bulb close to the frosted portal to create an entirely new effect. Love it. Very powerful angle for this ship. For some reason this shot makes me think she's around in Wrath of Khan too...
It would certainly fit the era Well, here's the next project. I'm hoping to get it done quickly. This is not a screen accurate version of the drydock. In fact, it's quite a bit different. This is because I'm doing a fully modular system that can fit several ships. I'm going to keep some of the details similar, so it's something recognizable from the era. Only one render for now: It'll also have a larger office structure and some cranes. Plus any other stuff I can think of
Oh fabulous! I can't wait to see this beauty in (in)action! (BTW, is that your Enterprise model?) And thanks googols for the overview of what you were doing with your lighting... good stuff there, especially with the visual aids!
No problem Always happy to help! And yeah, it's my Enterprise model, but it's a very early version that lacks details/textures. I use it when assembling scenes cause it renders a lot faster.
I've progressed quite a bit with the Drydock. Couple of images below. I'm focusing on getting the inner part ready so I can do some renders, but I'll eventually work on the outside stuff as well. This one will probably be another project that I'll work on occasionally and do add-ons as needed.
Even more stuff done here. I ended up going a bit crazy with the details in the ceiling, but that's all right
I more or less finished the inside parts. Here are a couple of renders with some basic lighting to show the details, and then a shot with the Enterprise. I'll render that properly eventually. I had to use denoiser to get it done in a timely manner.
I would love to render an animation of that sequence. The above image took 1.5 hours to render, and I relied heavily on the denoiser to make it look good. For now it's impossible But, I'll make a large render at some point. I'm preparing orthos of the Kusanagi as I write this. I'll post them later today
I'd like to see a large concept where several of such dock structures were wrapping--an asteroid say...