sorceress21

Mesh build is far from done but a good chunk of the core model is complete enough for a render test. I'll do a fictional scene write up when the dock is finished.

Modeled entirely in SketchupPro 2018. The mesh here including the Okuda Class Destroyer in the scene is nearly 20 million polys. There are only two displacement maps, one in dock wall texture that appears between the long "rail" structures and upper Dock overhead and one in the Okuda hull texture. The Test scene was rendered in Thea Studio in 8K with slight post-work done in Gimp 2.0

How's this guys? Look any better? I added flood lights to the lighting scaffolds, re-modeled the main dock panel lights and re-rendered.

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I've done a lot of work on the interior mesh...added details and tweaked the textures...

Main gangway airlock details..

I keep refining the design..can't seem to put a fork in it....

Description (Fictional – Part of my original scifi universe):

This is the Charas planetary System located within the Epsilion Indis Minor star system, (Kepler-44 in the Earth catalogue.) The system is home to the moon of Aquella, the homeworld of the Aquellan Republic.

Pictured here is Charas (the primary) a Class VI gas giant and three of its largest moons. Arcathia, Pyros and Aquella. In the foreground is the 4th moon of Charas called Arcathia, the 1st moon Pyros (center right) and the 3rd moon Aquella (top right). There is one other major moon called Nakate out of frame as well as more than 30 other minor moons orbiting farther out. Most less than 20 kilometers across making them barely visible.

While it appears to be a habitable and inviting world, unlike the paradise of its sister moon Aquella, Arcathia’s atmosphere has high levels of methane, and carbon dioxide. Additionally, moderate levels of sulfur dioxide are present making the atmosphere not only toxic to humans but slightly caustic. While gravity, atmospheric pressure and temperature make wearing a full environmental suit unnecessary for short term exposure on Arcathia a full face sealed PBE for respiration is required. Arcathia has a weak magnetosphere thus surface exposure is also limited due to high levels of radiation present its surface. Due to the dangerous environment there is no civilian presence on Arcathia. There are however an undisclosed number of RADF military facilities on the moon.

Image Details:

This is fully 3D. All bodies including the rings are hard surface modeled, scaled appropriately and positioned as they would be IRL. The gas giant is a “tweaked” NASA image of Jupiter. The Arcathia texture map is also a NASA map of our moon I “habitalized.” Too far away to see clearly the Pyros texture is the unedited Moon map and the Aquella textures except for the cloud map were created by me in Gimp 2.0 from scratch.

In general, I’m pretty happy with how this turned out. The one thing I don’t like is that I have not been able to create an atmosphere effect around the planets with Thea Studio that attenuates from the surface up like a real atmosphere does. If you zoom in close to the moon especially, you’ll see the atmosphere band is solid and doesn’t fade out with altitude. This is frankly pissing me off. There HAS to be a way to get that effect but I as of yet have not been able to discover how to pull it off in Thea. I achieved the atmosphere effect by surrounding the sphere with a slightly larger transparent sphere then assigning it as a container for a fog medium that I adjusted to get the right amount of haze. There doesn’t appear to be a way to get that medium to attenuate in a specific direction. There’s probably some way to get an atmosphere effect to come out right so my experimentation will be ongoing. Any suggestions on that front will be appreciated.

I'm not super happy with this render but I wanted to show the ship lit like it would be if it were all real. In TV and film especially artists tend to vastly overlight spacecraft as if there is some magical light source that always conveniently exists. Space, unless a craft is in direct sunlight from a local star is a very dark place. I'm really not happy with the moon. it came out really flat. It's actually a to scale sphere that's modeled in the same scene yet for reasons I don't understand there's no sense of depth.

Small update, work has been taking all my time lately...


I added the EECS booms to the con viewport area, some Acceleration Compensators to protect the Primary Forward Sensor Array. A pressurized service hatch for the Docking Buffer Compartment and the Ship's Awards Badges and the EVA Coms Array.

I'm taking a sabbatical from work and have had time to really pounce on the Okuda to finish off the exterior. I've done a fair amount of detail work and have addressed the shoddy textures.

Some narrative that will be included in the final prints that explains a lot of the external structures...

"The Okuda Class Heavy Destroyer, although an extremely successful design was rushed into production to meet the defense demands of the threat imposed by The Unity. The vessel is so over-powered that dissipating the heat and EM signature and structurally compensating for it's high sub-light velocity and maneuvering capability of the ship required an abundance of additional systems. Many of these compensatory systems had to be placed partially outboard due to the shear physical space demands of the equipment. Heavy structural integrity field generators, EM dampeners, degaussing field emitters, heat exchangers and heavy shield equipment all have disrupted the sleek outer hull with exposed components. Many of these components are equipped with self-contained defense field emitters to add a secondary layer of protection against combat damage if adversary fire is able to penetrate the primary defense shields."

Bow of the Okuda