I have one cooking ;) now but yes a bit of both. The Body Paint is a whole new world, for me. I've had photoshop a long time and now i wish I had studied it more. I've only done the basic stuff and let it be. Making textures from scratch is difficult.

Mandrake7062: I thought BodyPaint would slow you down! However, some often write that BodyPaint is complex to use and so others get conditioned into believing this to be so.

In fact, BodyPaint is no more complex than any other modern software - it only has functions and tools to get used to using.

Perhaps becoming more familiar with the basic functions and tools of BodyPaint with a simpler model would save you time in the long term - the Eagle has some complex work to get nice UV maps and It would be a shame to spoil your nice modelling with poor BodyPaint work.

I'm just glad I started texturing first. ;) Otherwise there it might not have been done. hehe

When painting gets finished I can give the each of the landing gears a bit of variation by swapping some of the footpad detail around. There are polygon selection tags for each part so they make it much easier to move selected polygons around ie: The paper labels 'stuck' to the footpad.

Looks great Becco.

Attention now turns to the passenger pod. This starts out with some swept splines and editable planes welded together.

Thanks Becco, left one is close enough, well guess I could fix both, kind of moot at this point.
Little depressed I guess, I'm at the top of my 3gig memory limit with TG2 or my render engine. I tried a real world render, as in atmosphere the simplest of landscapes, power fractaled fake grass, and I still had to back off on the booster, the chrome, and I still got errors.
I need Win 7 64 bit and TG2 64 bit with 12 gigs of memory, maybe then..
http://www.kdf-computers.com/download/eagle9a.jpg

Mandrake7062: I use 2GB memory so your 3GB would be a luxury for me. When I built this machine I was going to set up a duel boot 32/64 system but after more than a years' use I havene't found any need to (yet). I grew up with a just quarter Mb ram :-). Maybe you could render a few seperate images with Terragen and composite them together?

I would probably take the time to fully learn c4d's rendering system before I try that.
Hopefully this fall will bring both along though.

Crew cabin came out very clean Becco.
I skipped the door, to save polys, but added the rest, because you could see it.
On the series II, I did,  I have those 3 rectangular blocks sticking out, guess I screwed up

Mandrake7062: Thank you. I was undecided about adding the doors at the ends of the passenger pod but opted to make them - they can always be hidden from the render. Not sure what 3 blocks you are referring to but you can go back and fix the fault?

Three of the metal VTOLS' and a couple of model kit parts make use of Maxwells' true instancing and this saves 15,000 polygons at render time with only a negligable reduction in render speed.

Looks great Becco, but that big engine bell, support loop bracket eclipse is turned off in this shot..

Been wondering about the way you bake your AO layers and wondering if I could use that as a displacement layer in tg2. I'm going to have to look at that one.

Mandrake7062: Thank you. There is no support loop fitted to this version of the Eagle so that's why it isn't anywhere to be seen.

The AO I bake is just a greyscale image so could be used for many purposes. When I start texturing the Eagle I was going to try the AO bake in roughness and refection matererial channels. If you do some baking - remember to check the 'keep UV' box. Your original model will be hidden automatically and a copy made. I always delete the copy and apply material changes to the original object/s. I only use the baking to produce a greyscale image for use in my Paint software.

Wow I just found a 22 in the catacombs that did not have that elliptical type support bracket, that thing was hard to make..

The sky came from Vue and was converted to a .mxi image for use as a background in Maxwell Render. 

Looks great! I flipped around a copy of the front cage also.

"3d Shadow Mobile "
I don't understand that Becco?
This kit is going to be used on the land rover fron UFO?

Ok nice.. That bad boy is so kewl!

Mandrake7062: Thank you. I hope to finish that Mobile soon after the Eagle is finished. Most of the work left to do is UV mapping and painting. All being well it should (eventually)  feature in my UFO 'Moment Of Truth' sequence.

Becco, if you ever feel so inclined, email me that c4d model of the ufo, I know you said you put it up for poser, but I can't work with that.. I'm curious as to how well I can get that glass to work in tg2... Look next to impossible, but that's why I ask..

That glint of the Sun looks nuts.. Love it.

I guess I can just try your cockpit, as if it were glass, that would be close.. hmm i'll try that. Double wall though, sorry, didn't mean to distract. get back to work. ;) Thanks Becco.

Nice progress on the Eagle, Becco! I'm looking forward to the command module. :-)

That UFO render looks fantastic!

Cheers,
contrafibbularities

Mandrake7062: I have sent you a PM with download details for the UFO acrlic domes - they are not actually acrylic any more though because all Maxwell materials and tags have been removed.

contrafibbularities: Thank you. That in progress UFO render is still one of my favourites while I was making that model. I saved the Maxwell sky being used so I might render the final UFO model with some rotational motion blur in that sky. The only thing I didn't take note off was the Maxwell glare and light scattering settings I used - I can hopefully get something very similar though.

I did manage to look at it in c4d, I stuck an oil can in the open space.

Yes, I've got  ya.. I just wanted to fill in some more glass, in the open area.

Mandrake7062: I modelled the UFO over scale. You may need to resize the parts a lot smaller.

Mandrake7062: Those UFO parts turned out nice in Terragen - I thought you may have to scale down from my modelled (very large) size. The render engine I use works best with correctly scaled objects but many times I overscale to control depth of field to my personal taste.

Boy oh boy, looks so much cleaner then mine!!

Mandrake7062: Your Eagle turned out fine too. I'm not saying anything about mine until it's finished - I have plenty of time to mess it up! I've been watching some early episodes of Space 1999 and the 1st Eagle looks a lot more basic in terms of painting so that will hopefully make things easier. What I've decided to do with the passenger pod is to UV map it so that texturing the red striped rescue pod colour scheme is made more simple.

I almost tried that rescue paint scheme. But it was the uv that stopped me.