This image is driving me mad!  This is not strange for me to go into a sort of psychosis when I'm working on a huge image like this but that doesn't change the fact that It's kind of crazy.

One of the "bummer" aspects of this image is that every day when I sit down and stare at the original painting, I see something I've missed or did wrong.  That's been sort of a pain in my neck!  I have to keep re-working things that I sort of thought were done or add some things that I missed.

The lighting for this image is flat out plain and simple impossible.  If you look at the original painting, the back of the ship is all lit up but the shadows are all cast toward the viewer.  All the little ships are lit using rim lighting (which again aligns with the shadows) but none of that fits very well with the global lighting of the big ship.  Harris put a lot of details in the dark parts but if you review the original image, there are dark parts which are DARK and then there are dark parts which have lots of structure showing up.  Trying to get some objects to show up in areas where there's no light is not so easy.

I have several of the little "modules" or mini ships in the image finished now.  There are several "floaties" out way in the back which I've put in as blocks or another capsule shape I built.  With only one or two hours a night to work on it, I can only build one or two of these little ships a day.  It's slow.  I really want to get done!

However, I'm running out of the more detailed ships and I'm starting to get to the "what in the blob is that" versions.  The blob versions will be quite easy and I might be able to bash them out in one evening.

I have to figure out how I'm going to do the textures on the engine tubes still (I just haven't made up my mind yet, I have several ideas).  They're such a BIG component to this image and it really needs to look right.  I'm thinking what I will end up doing is setting up two different shaders for colors and mixing them using a hand painted map to get the transitions to work right.  That's a pain but I think it's the only solution that will really work.  Right now, I have two shader domains but it's just to harsh.

Then there's the whole lighting deal.  I'm getting closer every day but it's not a good idea to dial too hard on it until I get all the modeling done.  The texturing, lighting, and modeling all has to snap together in one big coinciding puzzle all at the same time.  I've been working on the modeling and most of the texturing as I go and I've beat on the lighting.

Until I get ALL the modeling done, then I can start dialing on the rest.  Modeling is almost always the one thing that is independent of lighting and texturing.  Finishing the modeling removes a degree of freedom to dial in the other two so that's always my initial push.

One of the other main modeling things that I have on my checklist is to re-adjust all the "shelves".  I want to mix up the thicknesses a little more and I need to extend some them out more to provide more shadows and more depth.  The shelves on the back area (way out there) are much better than the ones closer.  I just need to mix the closer ones up better and it will make a big difference.

There's a bunch of "ropes" in this image.  I don't know if you've ever tried to model ropes much but they are very clumsy!  You either have to fuss with the 3D sweep path in the spline modeler or fuss with some sort of sweep path in the vertex modeler and it's one of those weird things where working in a 2D environment (a flat computer monitor) makes it tricky when building a 3D object.  It's really clumsy.

I've discovered that if I increase the contrast post render that this thing looks a lot better.  So, it seems that I will be doing a significant amount of post work.  It will include,

Increasing the contrast (and the associated brightness).
Adding noise.
Softening it a little bit.

I have a procedure for adding noise which I like and it seems to work pretty well.  I think it adds a lot of depth to the image and makes it look a lot less CG (weird).

This is going to be my last developer post to this thread.  My next post will be to just announce the final.  I hope that will be by the end of this weekend.

Stay Tuned!

-Kix