Thesis Project: Kobol Exterior Texture Maps

This week was a doozy for my head.  I spent the good part of the week doing the texture maps for the exterior of the spaceship.  Because this is a completely metallic ship, I had to be creative in how I approached the project.  Like last semester with my robot, I wound up linking the sixty or so shaders for the individual parts to a set of master shaders that controlled the majority of the shader values.  That way, when I want to tweak the settings, I am not having to go through all sixty shaders to do it.  It took quite some time and my mind got bored of reconnecting shader pathways, but it will pay off.

I didn't want to get too grimy on this spaceship and, in fact, there are a few parts that I need to go back and clean up a bit.  I wanted to show regular wear and tear, just enough to give it a sense of division and help the form read a bit better.  The panel lines needed to be very subtle and I added a little bit of ripple to the seams in order to get that sense of imperfection to the way it was created.

I added some structural details to the landing gear wells to give it a sense that there is some engineering behind all of this sleek exterior.  I also set up the engine flaps so that they can be animated easily by linking their X-rotation values together.  All of the geometry is set up in a hierarchy so that I can do a quick and dirty animation of this thing landing with all of its surfaces popping out.

I tried doing an afterburner using a procedural texture applied to the transparency and incandescence channels of the shader.  It still needs tweaking, but it can do the trick if I need it to.

I have a self-imposed deadline for this in order to feel like I am prepared for my final presentation.  In addition, the deadline for the spring show is coming up and I would like to enter in something of my best work in order to get a chance at talking to some recruiters.