Project XR3 Phoenix (WIP)

Mental ray's default AO shader is horrendously innefficient, I would strongly recommend using another method. The final-gather based "fast" AO is a lot quicker, but you loose a lot of control.

A trick you may consider is rendering the AO at a lower res and up-scaling it; AO is usually smooth enough for this to have a negligable impact final quality. You could probably go as low as 1024 and still get a good result, in 1/16th the time.

You might also try Blender for the AO, in my experience you can get results just as good in a fraction of the time. Combine this with using a lower-res for the AO and it should only take a few minutes.
 
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Hmm - I fixed smoothing issues and had to re-UVW map the thing but I merged some meshgroups in the process so it will increase performance a bit.

I need to redraw both texture and normal map but that won't be hard now. UVW map is much better this time so it won't take much time.

01-xr3-5.jpg
 
Great work Loru. Taking a closer look, would it be better to have some sort of frame around the windows, for this type of craft?.
 
well - there is frame - just untextured right now as I'm rebuilding texture after UVW map change.
 
Here are window frames: I had to recreate texture as I accidentally merged layers and saved it:

XR-new.jpg
 
Forward crew access hatch:

01xr3-exthatch.jpg


01xr3-exthatch2.jpg


---------- Post added at 03:37 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:53 PM ----------

and here you can see size relative to crew member:

bridge-size.jpg
 
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I can't wait to fly this ship. It will be an honor to use this add on. Thank you for your time and the thoughtful design.

Thank you Loru
Russ
 
Working slowly on crew meshes (at first for VC, then for UMMUs)

crew7a.jpg
 
Loru, do you get lot of free time?

Actually I have more than usuall till end of may due to accident I had few weeks ago.

However I still have to oversee my company and and have ton of add-ons in queue.

In the mean time:

crew7a3.jpg
 
And what about the other half of the species? Us?
 
And what about the other half of the species? Us?

In modelling queue. :P

Actually it will be much simpler as I have reference pose from UCGO - just need to model male crew member around it. In female part I hadn't got proper pose (I'm doing it in pure 3ds max/dos 3ds and not in makehuman or poser, so it takes time but I have control over every face polygon.
 
Some minor fixes in crew mesh (reduced polycount of palm from staggering 2400 to 1000 polys), also made some exporting tests and material tweaking in orbiter.
 
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