ok I've been building some geometry inside the nacelles after looking at some stuff Tobian did, click on the image to see a test animation, the animation is unlit - all you can see are the luminous surfaces, but you should be able to tell what's going on
for this I used a sub surface scattering shader with refraction for the grills, and a glowing tube with mirror backing on the inside which you can see in the image above (trying to copy what they do to light real models here, the far side warp grill is left unchanged so you can see how much better this looks)
it still needs work but it came out ok in the test, I might bring the 2 tubes down into just one, and I'll have to model the grills instead of leaving that crappy bump map there, but you get the idea
Very nice man. I'm interested to see how this looks with modeled grills. I imagine the lighting interaction on the surface would be a little more complex as it flows over the different curves etc...Should look quite sweet.
here's some more tests, the top and bottom ones are modelled grills, while the middle 2 are the same bump map that's in the animation, you can see the bump map curves down at the front - which is wrong (I don't know what's causing it yet), but it stays straight around the large section of the grills so you can see what it should look like when I get it fixed
the grills with the brighter hotspots have 2 tubes while the darker ones have a single tube, I think the bump map and 2 tubes work the best, which is what I had originally anyway
I think I'll leave the grills with the bump map, what you can see in insurrection is smooth anyway, and this bump map doesn't actually make the grills look bumpy, it just changes the refraction, so if I set it up to have smooth specular hightlights it'll look great
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for this I used a sub surface scattering shader with refraction for the grills, and a glowing tube with mirror backing on the inside which you can see in the image above (trying to copy what they do to light real models here, the far side warp grill is left unchanged so you can see how much better this looks)
it still needs work but it came out ok in the test, I might bring the 2 tubes down into just one, and I'll have to model the grills instead of leaving that crappy bump map there, but you get the idea
the grills with the brighter hotspots have 2 tubes while the darker ones have a single tube, I think the bump map and 2 tubes work the best, which is what I had originally anyway
I think I'll leave the grills with the bump map, what you can see in insurrection is smooth anyway, and this bump map doesn't actually make the grills look bumpy, it just changes the refraction, so if I set it up to have smooth specular hightlights it'll look great
Amazing.