Other people say they remember it too. Am I the only one who actually forgot about this ship?
I’ve pretty much got the hull materials done. I’ve been tweaking a few things, and I may continue to do so, but this is basically it. Interiors are next, followed by something for that bare spot on the front underside. I also have some work to do on the bussards, though I’ll probably do those last as I’m likely going to rig them for animation. (similar to what I did on my TOS Enterprise) Also, I decided the ship has more than enough blue glows, so I switched the impulse engines to a red-orange glow.
On a side note, I’d like to say that, for professional software, Lightwave has to have some of the worst UV mapping tools. If you’re using flat images with planar, cylindrical, etc. mapping, you’re fine. However, unwrapping in Lightwave leaves very much to be desired. The default tool for doing it flat out sucks. It generates way too many parts. I have a plugin that’s a little better, but it’s an older plugin and I get a lot of error messages. Plus, it doesn’t put parts on the sheet straight, it puts things on there at an angle, making it a pain to try and put paneling on things. And, last but not in any way least, there’s no way to export generated maps to images. There are a few third party plugins, but they won’t work with Lightwave 64-bit, so they’re useless to me.
I did manage to get the plugin that I have to work for the weirdly shaped part on the back underside, (the thing the warp pylons connect to) so I was able to add some paneling there. However, a lot of other places that have “paneling” only do because I manually selected faces and changed the materials on them to create a paneling look.
