[Becco_UK]

A final preview before I finish off the rear walkways etc.

Note: I replaced the original posted image after making some corrections to the cages mesh.

[Becco_UK]

Revised mesh of the front cage - still has 'welded' joints. I will repeat that for the rear cage. That was only the start though - the revised 3d mesh needed the UV's correctiong. The ambient occlusion bake had to be redone too. That will teach me to pay attention

[Becco_UK]

Modified spine that rectifies my oversight. 5 hours flies by! I've also lowered the opacity of the ambient occlusion 'dirt' layer to 60% of all textures. The next full preview should show the effect of that.

[Becco_UK]

The final bit of modelling has been done to the rear 'walkway'. All model kit parts were measured during construction. Overall accuracy is very high but some parts surface detail was omitted. This sub assembly is now one model with one texture and one material.



Rear Shelves

[Becco_UK]

Front view. Something has gone wrong with the ambient occlusion bake and makes some of the door edges look incorrect. I will tidy that up later.

[Becco_UK]

The completed walkway goes back into the Eagle.

[Becco_UK]

The full Eagle as it looked earlier this morning. With this preview the Passenger Pod was given its plain 'white' textures. The passenger pod is also the next sub assembly to tidy up - too many small parts which can be connected to the main structure.

[rusteberg]

that's very cool

[Becco_UK]

rusteberg: Thank you.

The passenger pod has now been mostly tidied up. All the various model kit parts were connected to the main mesh, UV's adjusted and a new ambient occlusion bake. The four 'legs' and 'feet' are to be done seperately.

[Becco_UK]

Most of the Eagle model uses simple two layer Maxwell materials - the base colour (my textures) and one for the sheen. This is nice enough but could be much better. The sheen is the same all over the model but the model also has simulated dirt/dust in the textures that were created by using all the ambient occlusion bakes. Surface roughness should be greater in those areas.

These two blue spheres show this. The left one has a uniform sheen layer across the whole surface. The other sphere has variable roughness driven by a white to black gradient image. Therefore, I will use the raw ambient occlusion bakes to simulate this on my Eagle model.

[Becco_UK]

So with the ambient occlusion bakes placed in the maxwell material roughness channel I was also then able to increase the IOR (nd) value of the sheen layer. Trial and error here and will probably be subject to further adjustment as the model nears completion. This is what the Eagle looks like with the revised materials.

[Becco_UK]

From the rear.

[Becco_UK]

The last bit of tidying up concerned the passenger pod 'legs'. This was originally one sub assembly of several parts simply copied to make up the 4 'legs'. Some parts of the 'legs' were also sharing textures from other parts of the eagle.

[Becco_UK]

Now all the 'legs' are just two objects (I kept the chrome pistons seperate) and each 'leg' has its own set of UV's - can vary how they look when the painting gets underway.

[Becco_UK]

So, this is how the Eagle looks with all the tidying up done - the model is now more manageable to use and all ready to go in the virtual paintshop for a few days.