Quick flyby of the Big D to test out my conversion of Lewis Niven's model to C4D & Redshift. The windows are a bit too reflective - the 'off' ones look a bit like you can see through the ship (you can't) - so they'll be fixed for the next time.
Neither! Since the original had all the fibres sticking out a small amount, I decided to have mine set in a slightly-protruding frame. Completely avoids the need for any cutting, and looks more authentic to the original miniatures too.
The windows make use of a window box shader to fake a room behind. I made 11 different room sets, and close-up using EXRs they look pretty good...:
but from a distance they read terribly badly, so I opted for PNGs instead, and sadly the effect is largely lost:
but honestly, it will do. You don't want to get any closer to the ship than this anyway really.
I spent the last couple of days walking around the ship turning off lots of lights. These Romulans have a habit of leaving them on when they're not at home.
So I'm basically done with modelling now. Just a few things to tidy up before I move on to maps and materials and wrapping it all up.
OK, I have run off a bunch of renders, trying to find angles that don't make the ship look too ungainly Some are a little noisy; others I have re-run with the denoiser turned on.
I think I will make a short animation of her as well. This kind of thing is now totally feasible for me thanks to Redshift.
Integrated the lower boom - I hadn't noticed before, but it has a subtle downwards flare at the forward end, where it connects to the 'head' part of the hull. Of course the entire boom has a fairly strong downwards slope to it as well, which they either missed, or decided to ... 'correct' ... on the CG model. I think it's quite distinctive though, so it stays.
I think that's all the main features that I want to include in the base sub-d cage, so the next task is to merge all the bodies together and blend them correctly.
Lots of greebling has been done. I don't enjoy this kind of thing much, so it's slowed me down more than normal Done with it now though - only the windows left to do now! (and materials, obviously)
May as well start a thread going for this. Early days yet, but since there are no plans worth even glancing at available on the net, I have started off by doing some painstaking photo matching, and a little photogrammetry. I could not reconcile the various photos perfectly, so this will have to be my best possible compromise plus a good helping of Mk.1 Eyeballing. That said, I intend it to be the most accurate version of this ship to date by some margin.
I built up a very rough model to check my general proportions etc, and I am now developing on from there, so some areas are very rough still. Also just focusing on the silhouette at this stage, and most work has been on the upper wings so far. Lumpiness and wobbliness elsewhere to be expected at this point. The interface between the wings and the nacelles looks likely to be the trickiest aspect of this - very very rough for the moment. May completely change my approach to that area yet.