A sample of it as a aged grime edge thing and another render of some feather details I had cut who knows how long ago and never extruded. I think I decided not to extrude these as plates cause it was dipping a bit too deep into the feather thing, so I am not sure if I will keep this detail or not.
last image is sans the AI denoiser thing as it really makes mud out of the surfacing. Tempted to disable it entirely.
Increased height on the strut panels to match the lod of the other parts more. TRDL the panels here melded off far too son with distance than other parts of the ship. You can see on some parts where the light contour stuff is too consistent across outside corners. It is a mix with noise so none of them should have such a sharp line it should be mottled somewhat so I dunno might be the gloss contour causing this I dunno atm. Also included is a denoise pass and raw output. VR often leaves a scene faintly grainy unless you really crank the sampling up which will result in multi hours long frames with very little improvement in the grain and noise. It is so little you would not be able to see the change in each pass completed beyond the first 4 or 5.
Ok found a bit of a "bug" in the con tour shader, thin geo itll transmit through so that material will be seen as all edges so it gets the edge styling all over it. You can see this in the plates around the torp and the dome as they appear as a different material when they should MATCH the hull. This likely explains the cupola having a white dot in the middle instead of being dark with lighter trimming. Only solution is to delete the back faces and hope it isnt seen or a compromise of extruding the faces inward. Making them a different material does not really work though there might have been a mix or affect other objects/mats setting I wil have to recheck as I looked at so many various shaders. I think contour on the version of VR I Have is limited and lacks the setting. All of this is probably why some elements have a thick border around them as well Render below shows how the plates around the torp launcher are affected like this. If i kept them thin and deleted the back facing polies this goes away. BUT this leaves the sides of those plates floating over the hull and not water tight or even occluding into the surrounding mesh. Not something I like to do.
Mess of sub panels that probably make no sense in whole ship renders but meh. Added in the feather panels mostly cause I had that sort of thing else where on the hull so might as well since they were already there.
Starting the planning on the dome thing that I have been putting off since early days of this model. pfft. Of course this one is a real pain as it is a distorted dome so the panels are not breaking lazy like the other domes on here as those I could do something once and spin it. Here I am being forced to work in halfs, cant even do quads cause of the bloody tower. Going to try to keep it simple plates so I do not have to replicate fine details multiple times that and well I would rather it be fairly clean due to the shape and form of the thing.
Other misc renders were LOD passes to see how the panels looked at a distance. Also the thin geo uglies rearing it's head again on the forward bulkhead blast shield or whatever that lump would be. So I will have to look at fudging it so it isnt a mess of ugly generic noise blobs.
also this edge shader for wireframes used as a rounding tool might make me super fing lazy lol.
Lower plating in and start of the detail bits on all the cutouts. Not sure yet if I will retain the dashed crenelations(? probably some other term for sideways ones.) around the rim. If I do I might offset them so they are not extruding from existing geo, just did it to see how they look.
Also made an attempt to fix that forward shield but the edges are yucky solid lines cause the thing rounds underneath some because I WANT that look that the thing is tacked on but well the shaders just fight me lol. I could probably fix this by fiddling with some of the settings but I feel it will probably adversely affect the bits that are properly doing their thing.
ermmmmm, maybe I need to put some "stuff" into the tactical tower thing so you can see it is more than just red glow stuff. (well it is more like a inspection tower as it has that 360 look out and is kinda pointless with sensors)
It's not simple, I mean, it is, but it has a distinct simple silhouette. Which you absolutely want for a ship. The closer you get, the more glorious detail we get. Which is again exactly how it should be. I'm still a big believer in the idea that "a kid should be able to draw it."
Some more detail stuff, not much as I took a day off and ended up sorting my lego mess. . . . thus making a bigger mess. Ignore the stuff on the top most part of the dome as I dislike it and itll be going away. Tempted to cut the Klingon Logo into it if it was not for all the tight edges in that area. I should see if I could do my decimation trick up here as it is fairly flat. . . .
Posts
last image is sans the AI denoiser thing as it really makes mud out of the surfacing. Tempted to disable it entirely.
Other misc renders were LOD passes to see how the panels looked at a distance. Also the thin geo uglies rearing it's head again on the forward bulkhead blast shield or whatever that lump would be. So I will have to look at fudging it so it isnt a mess of ugly generic noise blobs.
also this edge shader for wireframes used as a rounding tool might make me super fing lazy lol.
Also made an attempt to fix that forward shield but the edges are yucky solid lines cause the thing rounds underneath some because I WANT that look that the thing is tacked on but well the shaders just fight me lol. I could probably fix this by fiddling with some of the settings but I feel it will probably adversely affect the bits that are properly doing their thing.
ermmmmm, maybe I need to put some "stuff" into the tactical tower thing so you can see it is more than just red glow stuff. (well it is more like a inspection tower as it has that 360 look out and is kinda pointless with sensors)