Well, I finally finished the ship with the landing gear and boarding ramp. Obviously, I just threw together the landing gear. Modo was crashing so much that I just wanted to get it over with. So they’re not too detailed. But then we’re not going to see them up close anyway. I had to repaint certain parts of the ship like five times. I finally figured out that modo just wasn’t saving the texture after I had painted it, or else crashed before the texture could be saved. Thus, I kept having to redo them. On the bright side it doesn’t take long to paint textures in modo. I’m not sure why it keeps crashing. I think it may be that my computer just can’t quite handle the load. And let’s face it, this ship is fairly processor intensive. But I can’t afford a new computer right now anyway, so I’ll have to make do with the crashes. The next ship I make will be designed to take fewer resources. At least that’s the idea. This ship, being my first in modo, wasn’t really efficient. I could redo the UV maps from four to only one or two, and then “bake” the current textures to the new UV map. Modo has that ability, but that’s a lot of work. So maybe if I get desperate…
This ship took about a day and a half or so to model (okay, it actually took three months to finish, but that’s because I was so busy.) Texturing would have taken about half a day, were it not for all the crashes and restarts. Rendering only took about a half hour. That’s amazingly fast considering that it’s HDRI (uses a special kind of photo to light it), and all the reflections, and considering the size of the final render. But that was just the ship. For the final scene, I’ll have to render it in pieces. To be honest I’m not sure what the final scene will look like. I’d kind of like it to stand out as a portfolio piece and be really impressive. But then again, I don’t want the story to stall anymore than it already has. So, maybe I’ll just keep it simple so I can finish it next week. I’m going to try to put forth more effort into getting back into the story, especially now that I’m finished with the book preparations. I’ll let you know as soon as the ebooks become available.
