Thanks Tweetytunes and Curtis, I'm quite pleased with it myself so far! Hope the rest goes as smoothly!

Hammer: I know, I haven't beveled all the hard edges, I have done some this time but as the pods will be quite small in the final image I don't want to push the poly count up too high just yet.
I've got a poly count limit worked out for each pod, how many of them I'll make instances of, the mother ship, plus instances of that, and then the "something bigger" that the mother ships dock with too. So hopefully it'll all work out!

Also, does anyone know the answer to this question, when you make instances of an object I gather it's just an image of it duplicated, so is the poly count effected as much as a normal duplicate?
I noticed when making instances in the last challenge the count was going up but I didn't get to check by how much each time.

yeah, the polycount does still go up. The only thing an instance gets for you is the ability to modify all of them at once.

Just started on the mother ships (named: Mother Grubber) docking bays, added a few pods so people can get the general idea of what it'll be like, loads of hours of fun to go, yay!

Got the main part of the docking system almost finished, next is to do the part behind it where the grubs get into the pods and where they are loaded onto these launch docks. loving doing this, no limits to the imagination!

Docking bay and launch pad has progressed a bit more.

that docking bay looked like a dog collar in the early pictures

man, looks like you're ship is going to be HUGE... wouldn't want to mess with that... especially with all those little guys to protect it

Looks really cool..cann't wait to see the final stage!

Dude looks fantastic.


One thing though - do you know how to do a Occlusion render ??, as I think it would help to see some of the details on your model. - its what helps mine look pretty

Scrap what I said in the last post, just found out how to do the Occlusion render, here's one!

dont think you did it right but may just be your render settings. A lot of the magic is done in photoshop.

There`s two ways I know of

Simple basic way..

1) Select the objects you want to render, create a new render layer and add objects.
2) Right click and select pre-sets > Occlusion.
3) Edit setting by clicking the martial button on the layer
4) render.

I do it this way

1) Got to the hypershade and create a new surface shadder.
2) switch to the mental ray tab in the hypershade and create a new texture > mb_anb_occlusion .
3) drag this into the out color of the surface shadder.
4) Edit settings to what you want er samples (I use 128) and Max distance (this depends on your scene).
5) Apply the shadder to the objects you want to render.

I do it the second way because you have more control - (perfect example is if you want to add a transparency
map) and you get a black background which I like.

Finally render (MR) with all Final Gather and raytracing off. These makes no difference to the final outcome apart from slowing it down.

Then take that image and your normal one into photoshop and overlay the Occ render on top and set to multiply. Sometimes it helps to take down the opacity aswell but not always.

Another tip I have for you is - create 2 Occ layers in photoshop. Set the top one to Multiply and then the second one to Exclusion. Just a personal thing but I think it looks better.

Here is some examples

color

http://www.ravage3d.com/images/sship/tut_part1.jpg

occ

http://www.ravage3d.com/images/sship/tut_part2.jpg

both occ and color (as you can see needed to lower the opacity of the occ but forgot)

http://www.ravage3d.com/images/sship/tut_part3.jpg

occ, color and 2nd occ set to Exclusion

http://www.ravage3d.com/images/sship/tut_part4.jpg

Thanks for the info Tweetytunes, I'll give it a go! Unfortunatly it'll have to be on wednesday as I use mobile broardband and I'm out of credit so will be offline for a few days, guess it'll be modeling only til then! Cheers though, I've been wondering about the render layers options for a while!

Yay, still got the internet for a few more hours. Not worked out the Occlusion rendering properly yet as I've been working on the modeling more,but here's a basic render of it so far. Going to start on the main body soon.

And a wire on shaded just for the fun of it....

thats looking fantastic - well done

Thanks Tweetytunes! Just hope all the detail I've put in doesn't get totally lost as the ship grows bigger!