What I Did On My Summer Vacation

So I decided to take a couple days off from the Saloon scene to clear my head a little, and was hunting through the half a billion models and scenes on my hard drive when I came across my old Enterprise model.  The thing has been sitting there collecting dust since November of '08 and had still not been textured.  I think I unwrapped it about a year ago.  So for my break I figured I would slap some textures on this thing and see what happens.

Of course, nothing is ever as simple as just slapping some textures on.  I had to do a few things to the mesh (re-centering some stuff that was somehow off-center, adding windows, etc), and rebuilt the glowy bits at the end of the warp nacelles with all the moving parts, working off a diagram of the guts from the original studio model.  So those are animated, but you won't be able to see that in a still shot, naturally.

First render is below.  Still a work in progress.  The entire secondary hull still needs to be textured, and that's a big job.  Will probably finish that up tonight or tomorrow and head back to the Old West.

And this one here is one of my favorite shots.  It should actually be a lot better once the rest of the windows are modeled in and lit: