Materials have never been my strength, so any help welcome! This is my first ship ever, so I don't know the best tricks.
If you're using Mental Ray, the Architecture and Design Materials are wonderfully easy, yet extremely malleable. If possible, I'd the various levels of azteking in a composite shell material, and give each one a separate BDRF Custom Reflectivity Curve. After that, you could mess with the specific color of the reflection.
It's basically what I did for this project. The base of the Tower on the left is consists of glass with the same diffuse color and transparancy, but the reflectivity is altered on each one giving it a varied look.
Thanks for the tips. I always use MR Arch + Design materials. My current setup for the ship is just using a specular map to create different levels of reflectivity for the different parts. Do you think I'd be better off with only variations in the BDRF curve rather than just specular maps?
Anyway, I'm posting to give an update on my progress. A few days ago I decided I don't like the look of the textured on windows, so I'm basically rebuilding the main body from scratch to build it a different way. I had almost finished the entire ship, and while it would have been good enough, I'm really a lot more excited now about creating a great Voyager model. It's only the main body I'm rebuilding. The details such as transporter emitters, phaser strips, torpedo launchers etc were all separate anyway, so they're still good to go.
Before I was using a low poly mesh and smoothing it at render time, which made it difficult to add cut out details such as windows without messing up the shape when it smoothed. Now I've made the main mesh and smoothed it, then merged it down and am adding the details with regular poly modeling, and optimizing the mesh as I go. So far the results are a lot better. Not sure what the usual technique is for the pro ship builders here, but this is my first spaceship, so I'm adapting as I go.
I've now done all of the hull panel lines as geometry instead of textured, and corrected some errors in the shape of the nose of the ship. I've also been cutting out all of the windows and sensor arrays from scratch and they're a lot neater now. I'll also be re-texturing the ship to use larger, more subtle aztecing.
Here's the new mesh so far. Not much to look at yet.
Here are a few renders of the older model before I restarted it-