Star Trek - Balance of Terror Project

[no_mad11]

That is a sweet interpretation on an updated TOS version of the romulan warbird. Love the menacing tone you've given the design, with the downward nose angle & upward angle on the wings. The decals give it a nice finishing touch.

[BillS]

I really like that it has that nice balance to it.

[Madkoifish]

Yes it will be more of a painted on thing than it is now, atm it is just a mask map. Technically itll be orange and reds with maybe black detailing. Not sure if I will go with outlines like the original.

For got to post this update earlier today or was that late last night lol

Well I think I will go with the ordered look over the curves. It has that roman look vs that alien plating of TNG. So everything mid strut to the nacelles will be redone.

[bmckain]

That's much better. I think it looks far more menacing now.

[Rigel]

Excellent update. I would love to see this animated with your Connie.

[Treybor]

I can almost here the Star Trek batle music palying in the background....

[Madkoifish]

hurrr who knows........ hah

sent on my new cel galaxy sIII

[Madkoifish]

lol anyhow forgot to upload these a few days ago. Been busy messing with my new cel and a few other things like watching anime or whatnot. (tv has really gone to shit even my documentary channels are shit) Oh well. HAH
I think I might go and do these textures as diffuse, sucky part means I have to apply the hull patterns to the flat texture and rebuild the pearl surfacing but ehh least this way I can fake some details in texture etc. Issue is though getting the wing bits underneath the outer overhangs. Doing them as a solid (easier to align the damned decals) means it projects through overhangs. Leaving crap underneath that I do not want. Visible in the rear 3/4 shot. So what I will likely have to do is create multiple materials YUCK and on the wings just paint out all the rest of the texture. YUCK YUCK and more YUCK cause that means more textures eating up render time.

[Rigel]

That looks really good.

[Madkoifish]

Bit of a durrr hurr moment dunno why but forgot about composite in the diffuse slot! lol. So that solves the remapping of crap, I just have to set my mat ids to separate areas and voila fairly properly mapped. I just need to separate out the winglet bits.

[Madkoifish]

Close up as Im adding gunge. I probably should wrap this particular material around the wings some more once I get to those areas. Debating though if I should not be looking at cutting in more paneling etc. And how much grime and crap.

[Madkoifish]

Some more dirt, and separated the wing bits to correct the pass through of the upper decal.

[bmckain]

Looks really good, I like your use of ship lighting.

[Madkoifish]

Lots of little markings all over. But you cannot see them that well! hah. I also added a drab layer, well not drab but added all the grime into the "roughness" slot. Though I dunno the hull is not that glossy enough to see it I think. I do think I should remap some of the channel 1 stuff so that that hull pattern does not center on the ships center line it is causing some visual distortion by seaming down the middle and making it appear that the mesh is dented in along the center line in places due to dark and light panels meeting up in places.

I think I should uh MOVE ON now before I clutter this up too much. Maybe I should adjust my lighting to show crap off better?

Texturing, not sure how complete I will make this IE as in whole object or just do key areas to fake it out. HAH Things like the nacelles I think I will HAVE to render to texture or some crap to get them flattened out since planar projection would fail hard here. I WILL though get off my lazy ass later and sorta wrap the existing bird maps around things like the wings so that I can get grime marks to wrap vs avoiding the leading edges.

And yeah I know that shuttle area is lacking in dirt. The "lip is a bit of an issue so likely I will have to chop that area up into another material and apply it. I also left it kinda cause well those windows back there just seem to feddy in size. And just do not seem to serve the original purpose much since having such a large area dedicated to shuttle ops can not be justified. Dunno. Kind of feeling to lazy to fix it too.

[Madkoifish]

Originally Posted by bmckain

Looks really good, I like your use of ship lighting.

Do you mean the self lighting and the marker lights? Cause the only "gizmo" lighting I have on the thing are the marker light omnis at the moment. I was unsure if ship lighting as appropriate on this. The Thanatos though does have self lighting so maybe it wouldn't be out of place though I do not think we ever saw a Romulan ship self lit in any trek. It would lend a lot of drama I think to this shape though!
mmmmm something to think about. Already ruining the render times of this thing with the texture maps, multiple 6k pngs with 32bit alphas.

[bmckain]

Originally Posted by Madkoifish

Do you mean the self lighting and the marker lights? Cause the only "gizmo" lighting I have on the thing are the marker light omnis at the moment. I was unsure if ship lighting as appropriate on this. The Thanatos though does have self lighting so maybe it wouldn't be out of place though I do not think we ever saw a Romulan ship self lit in any trek. It would lend a lot of drama I think to this shape though!
mmmmm something to think about. Already ruining the render times of this thing with the texture maps, multiple 6k pngs with 32bit alphas.

Yeah, sorry I wasn't clear but that is what I was referring to.

[Madkoifish]

Beginning of the bridge textures. Took a while since I had to model in the windows and crap and restart the textures since I forgot about the needed modeling. Still feel I need to add some greebles to this area but again that fight against the non-clutter of TOS and the clutter of TMP. I am a bit ehh on the #1 mapping channel (panels) on this area so I might just planar it all later on. I have not added the roughness map yet and I will likely do a small bump for all the hatch and panel work that are textures. Or I might flake on that and leave them as a diffuse detail. Again likely to never see this stuff in renders or animation. hah.

oops got distracted with clearing hdd and stuff. Renders this close up are murder in the time it takes to complete. I am considering yanking off the micro bump that is on the entire hull to attempt to save time.

Images are about 2hrs or so old now. >_<;'

[BillS]

Those close ups are stunning though.

[Madkoifish]

I think it is mostly done on this area time to spread out to the next area of work, the fin and main upper hull. Then time to argue with the sides and upper wings then the nightmare, the nacelles. HAH

[Madkoifish]

Stuff from last night

[Mikala]

That is trés sexy!

[Afalk]

Man I do so very much love these updates! Can't wait for hte next installment!

[starship]

Dan, surelly this one have a place between the best fan designed ships from all the times.
About the black contour for the bird, I think it can be more thin than what we see in TOS.

[Madkoifish]

Originally Posted by starship

Dan, surelly this one have a place between the best fan designed ships from all the times.
About the black contour for the bird, I think it can be more thin than what we see in TOS.

I never mentioned adding contour lines to the decal. I have no plans to do so. Just possible wear detail and maybe more painted details such as hatch markings etc.

[Madkoifish]

Ok, obviously I took a bit of a break from this thing. However I had thoughts about detail levels. AMT I am just shooting mostly for the blotchy grime effect. But I was considering how much of an effect I want to give to the painted areas of the ship. I am testing the diffuse affect with the smaller bird decal since it is smaller thus faster to experiment with. Drawback is well it is much smaller area to work with! So I do not have the pixel count to really go in depth.

I have been arguing how much more complex I should make these materials.

KIM I will never have any intention to get this close to the ship either. It is just to show the detail on the decal. The paint wear is a bit crap atm, obviously i need to reference some examples. Anyhow what I wanted to do in the end is get feed back if something like this is going a bit too far or the right move.

1. separating out the painted surfacing from the main raw hull
2. adding wear to the decals as if it was painted on but likely to not resolve in any detail. Sub option of obliterating the aniso in the painted areas, this would req a full restructure of the materials AFAIK.

I probably should work on the tone mapping for the "gloss" layer the paint is a bit too glossy. A 256 level gray scale image, well it is higher but I do not think max sees anything higher, exp given the slot this is going in is a numerical slot that maxes at 100. . . Though it can take decimal entry to the hundredth, I think. I will have to verify if it steps to thousandths. Well I dunno HAH maybe it is higher W/E working with a 256 palette basis in the paint app. Enough said.

Also note I have not messed with the aniso and other hull material settings so that whole change in height thing that causes the wobbly reflections is still in effect on the painted hull. You can see this in the close up where the decal is all jaggy due to passing the rez point. (btw the texture is already a 4k image. it covers the smallish bridge section.)

[Madkoifish]

Here are some examples of the adjusted gloss on the big decal. It shows off the hull patterning more. Some regards Id rather it not be so contrasty between on and off but that is the aniso and normal maps coming into effect. But again this is where Id have to add in maps or channels layers or something to get around it. Not sure atm if I should though heh. Maybe create a 2 layer texture in the aniso slot with separate UVW channels issue is matching it all up when it comes to connecting parts such as the nacelles.


Going to bake off a render with a composite in the aniso slot and later up those textures and see how it works out. I will post it as soon as I get back.

[Madkoifish]

Over boosted the light on one to kick up the effect but smooth finish paint. Having to use composites in the aniso and the normal bump slots.

[starship]

Originally Posted by Madkoifish

I never mentioned adding contour lines to the decal. I have no plans to do so. Just possible wear detail and maybe more painted details such as hatch markings etc.

In the post #93 you wrote ...Technically itll be orange and reds with maybe black detailing. Not sure if I will go with outlines like the original.

by outlines I understood contour lines. My fault!

[Madkoifish]

Ah brain fart on my end. (<----see avatar, lol really if I wore a sailor blouse and a skirt, it would depict me on the nose. I need a haircut. ) Not been doing to well on that side of things of late O_o.

But, yes. I will not have outlines on this thing. Least not right now.

[Madkoifish]

A small small update. Shows me working on the smaller wing decals with all the scratching and crap. I have yet to add the filth layer onto the paint and apply it to a roughness map. Though I might skip that since this is already a buttload of maps loading up per section. I sorta wish I had projected those slats in the wings onto the ref images so I could have included them as part of the grime layer. Oh well.
Also you can see that centerline area is even worse. SO I will have to collapse the mesh later on and remap the #1 channel so it does not seam in the center of the ship. Odd how the yellow markings look like poo too.
Then on to the upper struts and ship sides AND the nacelles then I think it is finished. Oh maybe some cheapo interior maps/objects.