This was a model I wanted to build ages ago but never got round to it. It's really just meant for establishing a scale of other ships and as such its not particularly detailed. Total build time till now is 6 hours I think. I went through a few revisions of the sails and plating. I'll go back to this to detail the sail hinge mechanism later. I tried a few muscle/sinew type shapes but couldn't quite decide on anything.
Transport coming next.
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Although I think the ships in B5 are more sleek? unless this is a new ship your creating?
Hope you give other races of the B5 universe a try.
I have a soft spot for B5 as it fixed me on the path to a love of modelling space related objects. At the time it was quite amazing, I often forget just how new CGI it was back then. How things have changed!
I don't think I'll do any more B5 ships at the moment. I blocked out the Vorlon Heavy Cruiser but its 9 times bigger than the transport and I haven't come up with a scalable way to detail it yet. I always loved the Shadow fleet; giant space spider ships... genius! The problem I had with them is they're all black. Any detail that you can make out gets obscured by the rippling surface texture. I have 5 shadow ships I think, mostly simple NURMs meshes with an animated procedural. If I could come up with a way of making them more visually interesting I'd probably do one or two but to be honest I kinda like them just as they are
I made some progress on the sails today. I tried a few overly animated shapes but I didn't like any of them. I think they disrupted the silhouette too much. I also rebuilt the materials. I had a lot of crazy blends and mix maps before. I've collapsed them all into a few composites now, which allowed me to add an AO map. I was trying to get more emissive light from the blue material but everything I tried turned blue into white. Compromises, compromises....
More tomorrow I hope.
At this range the traditional shadow material looks a bit odd, but it was sized for the larger cruisers and I'm not sure what increasing the detail level will do at this stage. The new materials have brutalised the render times. Like, in the face...... I'm not sure if anything can be done about that at the moment.
As far as design goes, well, its almost heresy but I kinda like the way it turned out and it would make an interestesting red-glow vs. blue-glow scene. Any opinions?
I'll get back to the Vorlon transport soon, I was stumped for detail ideas and then this shadow thing loomed in and refused to withdraw.
I also tweaked the skin materials. I replaced the bump and gloss/spec maps and modified the diffuse map with an ambient occlusion mix to give a little extra color saturation in the corners and sunken edge. Its very subtle though, I don't think it would be particularly noticeable in the renders. I finally got the membrane over the blue glowing materials the way I wanted!
FULLACK !!!
@DWL
Any change to get the skin more organic?