While I’m hardly the first person to try and model the Roci, I love the show and the design of the ship so much I wanted to try my hand at making my own. Started with a quick blockout following some reference sheets I found online, then started adding more detailed pieces over that. Trying to work my way down the detail hierarchy, starting with the big shapes.
Have most of the main pieces in. Next I’m gonna tackle some more details around the cargo decks, the struts and fins around the engine bell, and swapping out the temp comm array for the real one. Then the reactor housing, and the PDCs, and all the little bits like RCS thrusters, torpedo bay doors, covers and seams…
At one point I was thinking of UDIM-painting this to texture it, but the more I look at it, the more I think I might try and do it with just decals and tiling substances.
Added PDC “holsters”, including mount arm for side guns
Added most of the RCS thrusters, might adjust this/add more/remove some still
Added landing thrusters
Various greeble bits and panel seams
Detailed crew airlock door, added torpedo bay doors
Numerous fixes with the side weapon pods which looked weird/didn’t match the reference. I think I may have gotten it right finally? (there were several other iterations since I lasted posted)
Added reactor cladding
Detailed drive nozzle, including fins around the engine bell, some tweaks to the struts, and various structures in the throat of the nozzle
Detailed comm arrays a bit more, still not really happy with this part though
TODO:
Various bits on the nose above the crew airlock door
Cargo airlock and surrounding seam details
Rework PDC dupligroup structure so they can actually be controlled sanely
Add some more larger greebles up front, kind of a lack of secondary shapes up there right now
Might change the engine structures a bit? Undecided right now
Take another pass at the underside of the nose, see if I can clean that up a bit.
Obviously the airlock hatches and PDCs still need to be painted. Decals are also missing (ex, MCRN logo). Plus the main painted texture has some areas I haven’t gone over and just have the “default” pattern I had at the bottom of the stack. (that’s why you see the black thermal tile shader on the reactor radiators, for example). Comm masts have essentially a placeholder texture, and the drive FX have a lot of work to do too. Onward!
Some more painting. Lots of little refinements still to do, and I wanted to add some dust, marks around the RCS thrusters, etc. But the PDCs and airlocks have some basic mats in place, and all the decals and major points of the livery are in the main painted texture. (thanks to /u/Tzsycho on reddit for letting me use their MCRN logo graphics, saving me the pain of having to try to copy it myself)
So I think that takes care of all the glaringly-missing parts of the textures. Just detailing and polishing from here. Plus I need to finish the drive plume still, and I’m not totally happy with the airlock/metal texutres.