It’s Been a While

Star Station India gets some new attention to detail and several ships in port.

Been away from all things 3D for quite some time and haven’t updated this site for over two and a half years, but I’ve been working on updating a lot of features of Star Station India over the past few months.
I updated my Lightwave program over two years ago, but never touched it since my older computer couldn’t handle it.  This space station eventually got too big to render as a single unit on the older software, and I got tired of rendering shots of a docked ship from clever angles that helped conceal the fact that large portions of the station weren’t even present.  I found it nearly impossible to render more than one ship docked near another without the program crashing.

I all but gave up on it for quite a stretch until recently, when I got a newer model computer that can handle that Lightwave upgrade (which is probably obsolete by now), as well as this behemoth model of a space station.  It’s allowed me to render the station in its entirety by cloning 3 of the outstretched armatures from the only one I’ve ever actually modeled (the South Pier) and rotating them in 90 degree increments.  Hull markings for the East, North, and West piers is all set in a single core layer, with polygons that rest just above their designated surfaces without casting shadows.  My new computer even allows me to render multiple ships docked all over the place! No crash! (yet)

I’ve added greebles, viewports, and glowing details to as many plain surfaces or nooks & crannies that I can think of, while trying not to go too overboard.

Upgrading the station has mostly been a greeble fest for all the nooks and crannies, as well as the addition of details across large open surfaces to help break up some monotony.  I’ve also added a ton of exterior windows to the core hubs and the large pylons below the piers. However, unlike those concourse windows on the piers that are actually modeled into the geometry, I had to resort to faking these new view ports.  My texturing skills are still pretty lack luster, so these are cut-to-shape “surface floaters” much like the hull markings and surface labels (in fact, they reside in the same layer). Since fully modeled viewports take up a huge polygon count and the new ones will only ever be really seen from a good distance, I figured I’d start there.

An updated core-ward view with new details and textures in place.

This was the last time I rendered that same angle (with the USS Corsica docked) in 2015. I only had one Pier/Arch armature I could render at a time. This was a rotate-it-multi-render-cut-&-paste-Photoshop nightmare by comparison to the newer version.

A view from one of the maintenance bays on the upper West arch, looking out and down. North and East bays are easily visible across the way.

I added a bunch of greebles to the upper towers, including some maintenance bays, (because you can never have enough maintenance bays 😉 ).  Just another set of locations where maintenance craft and crew can settle in and do repair work.  Their assigned markings also help crew members floating nearby in workbees or thruster suits maintain their orientation and know exactly where they are.

These images don’t look nearly as dark on my home computer as they do on my work PC.  Still, here’s one I haven’t altered since the original render (unlike several of those above, where I adjusted the brightness a tad).

More to come, soon…

~ by starstation on March 6, 2019.