Well here's after a few more hours (probably four).  I'm just hacking on this thing a few hours after work during the week.

I have the original source image as my wallpaper at work right now so I can study the beast.  Today, I figured out a lot of stuff and I'm getting pretty close to knowing how I'm going to do pretty much everything.

It's sort of strange how I require time to get an image into my head.  This particular image has so much stuff in it!  I keep finding little details all over the place!  It's cool to find things but it's sort of scary because every stupid thingy I see in the original becomes a thingy I have to recreate somehow.

The original painting is truly impressive and trying to match it with textures is a whole nightmare unto itself.  A lot of the original image carries its weight in the surface textures.  I will not be able to reproduce a lot of it but I will give a pretty good shot.

This version that I'm posting here has a lot of changes from the previous image but it's not really obvious.  For example, Harris has a strange distortion in the left engine pod along the top edge and I originally thought I'd just ignore it but after staring at the thing for several days now, I decided to hack a way to get the distortion into my version.

Well, I did that and it messed up the whole white structure between the engine pods along the top.  That also stuck the mesh up into some of the lighting that I'm using for other things so I had to add planes to "shade" lights from interacting with things they shouldn't.  Then I discovered other blocks sticking out where they shouldn't so a whole bunch of stuff had to get moved and scaled.

For you the audience, it probably looks essentially like the same image with just a few thingers here and there but it's not.  Laying the foundation at this point is crucial so that when all the extra dinky details start going in, it will all fit together like a perfect puzzle.

That's why staring at the original for a few days actually pays off big time.

As another example, I decided there are actually seven humanoids in the original image hidden here and there.  Ok, some of the things in the original that I will be making into humanoids are actually sorta undecipherable blobs in the orignal but hey, that's just how it goes with this kind of work.  The point is that now I know where the smallest humonoid in the image is which means that I can put the first one in, scale it and then all the other structures which have humanoids will then use the scale of the first one and that will make all kinds of things fit together.

I figure there are 15 little support ships in the original.  Since a few of them have humanoids, that means that now I know how big all those little ships are!  That means that building them and getting their shapes and perspectives correct will be a LOT easier to figure out now.

All that stuff has to be figured out one way or another and for me, getting it figured out ahead of time saves a bunch of effort later.  I still get trapped on some stuff (you just can't figure it all the first time) but staring at something for a while makes a big difference!

Stay tuned!

-Kix