This post is part of a meta-series. Click here for a list of all posts in this series.
Everything’s now frozen and optimized! That means it’s time to start cutting! My first stop was the large Spectre fighter catapult bay. I decided to make this an open-air bay rather than two separate conduits to give maintenance crews easier access to a craft on one side or the other, allow for common feeds (fuel, munitions, etc.) to be housed in the midline and service both catapults, etc. The (eventual) doors will be “garage door”-style segmented doors, like those on the main shuttlebay of the Galaxy class.
Here’s a quick viewport render of the frozen bridge module, too.
Inspired by Martocticvs, I spent some time fooling about with lighting and tone mapping with my Ambassador as a guinea pig to figure out the workflow for that. The results are pretty cool! I then continued working on the Spectre bay interior. The exterior spine needed more interior representation, and the bay was cavernous enough that it felt like it needed more structural support, so I continued the spine’s structure into the bay as a sort of aqueduct-like shape. This still allows crews to easily flit from one fighter to the other, but makes the ship a bit more sturdy.
All of this is still light by one external point light and one emissive “fill” plane, with a very small amount of the AO pass added in. The rest of the illumination is due to the tone mapping, which I am just so excited about. I’m actually going to ditch everything but the single point light, which I’m going to convert into a “sun” (think “infinite” or “distant” light) light. With tone mapping, that should be all that it needs and it should make the resulting images much richer.
Started adding detail to the modular wedges, in the form of Deck 3’s windows!
The windows and rooms are a bit more complex than on my Ambassador. There, the windows were just cut-outs in the hull, with full-emissive UV-mapped texture boxes behind them. This time around, the windows have two polygon layers of actual “glass” that includes a slightly glossy surface. The rooms are still UV mapped boxes, but the shader is more complex: the “top” of the box is full emissive, but the rest of the room is a mixture of diffuse with emissive hotspots. In other words, the rooms are not just providing light, they’re also being lit this time. Should make for somewhat more realistic looking interiors…not that you’ll usually see anything this close-up anyway. :p
I also did away with my old lighting rig and have gone to a single “sun” lamp model now, with all of the fill light provided by indirect bounce and tone mapping.
This took way longer than it had any right to!
These panels will end up being dark, dark gray once they’re textured, with some light gray trim.
Of course, had I filleted the corners first, then extruded and beveled, I would’ve saved myself a lot of trouble! The next three panels took a total of only fifteen minutes.
Pushed through to finish out the various panel blocks for the modules and put the windows into the deck 6 sub-modules.
Here’s an OpenGL shot of what the modules look like without their sub-modules plugged in:
