Work.In.Progress
Modern Orbital Facility -26-07-2001
I've started on some orbital stuff today, because i got a subliminal message by a famous guy that is in the wolfpack :)
Right now it's pretty simple, i need to add 200 000 polys of overkill details !

	Just a bunch of objects to define an overall shape, no details, mostly extruded splines with refined/rescaled ends to round the corners a little...
Added some rough details, (used the shapemerge tools in MAX that let you project splines on objects and extrude the resulting faces ). I also used a global lighting, the usual, a zillion free spots surrounding the model and yadda yadda...see the "brick & mortar" tutorial in the articles section for details...
	Preliminary mapping, with the standard space metal maps ( yeah the ones they used for all the ships in Babylon 5, you have them in MAX too... ), as you can see it doesn't look too good..the "bloom" effect ( aka glow on brightness ) is a bit excessive too...
As they say, you are best served by yourself, so i made my own maps , mixed them with a crappy rusty metal map ( RGB Multiply , or MIX in 3dsmax ) and this is the result...as you can see, it's much better.
	YES ! it's a big big nuke reactor...ok 4 of them coupled with a big ass exhaust ( i have yet to add details to the exhaust )... notice how the cables suddenly give life to the model...
Alrite....don't ask what the red balls are..i don't know..maybe some auxiliary fuel tanks in case the nuke feed evaporates too fast :)... current state of the model : - 86 000 polygons - 60 lights - 4 minutes of rendering time per frame ( with all the raytrace mess of course ) tomorrow i'll fix some new higher res maps and work on the rest of the ship if i have time, knowing that this part is only the engine...
	Ok, so i added some kind of half dome here yeah, ain't it looking cool ?...no ?? u sure ??? coz Georges Lucas told me it was ..yeah ...u don't believe me, right ???
Finally, we know where the astroboys screw the astrochicks ( note : i could have said where the astrochicks screw the astroboys ..but heh i'm sexist ! )....
	Closeup on the secondary hab / orbital command center
Yay, another big ring..whooooo yeah yeah yeah :) This one is the main hab ring, where all the chicks are :)
not much today, more elementsand some cool solar panels...