that is astounding :eek:…
=O I really need to get some tips for you.
Simply amazing…
Mind if I interviewed you for my Blender Blog?
If you want to take a look, here’s the link.
Very good, very good.
Ah, I thought the mesh was not that dense and was interested in your technique on adding details like phasers and windows. A closeup of those areas maybe?
That last render is already very nice.
Just ask what you need to know.
Here’s a close-up of an area with windows and phasers.
As you can see, the windows are cut right into the hull (used booleans for that). Since the mesh grid is pretty dense, those triangles around the windows aren’t a problem when rendering the ship. The phasers are a seperate object. The adjusting to match the curves of the hull is done by adding a lattice modifiers to the phasers.
I hope this answers your questions regarding the details.
UPDATE:
Not much but I thought if I’m already posting I could as well post the latest update.
I decided not to unwrap the whole mesh. I’ll use a good procedural texture for the basic hull texture and add details like the ship’s name with “decals” (see this BlenderWiki article if you don’t know what I’m talking about 
)
The latest picture shows my first test with a decal. I added the name and registry number. I also made the ship less dark.
Cool, thanks alot! 
The writing is a little stretched, no other crits at this point. The last two renders really took me by surprise because of how good they looked without textures.
I think i prefered it when it was a little darker, i grow tired sometimes of everything having to be well lit, in space, near a star it would be realistic for one side to be over exposed and one side to be under exposed, but i realise this wouldn’t make a great render, i dunno, sometimes i think that really dark shadows look more dramatic.
Grutzi… It looks fantastic. Stick the Edelweiss logo on there and it will look perfect. 
Like The_Animal said the writing looks a bit odd due to it being stretched but thats the only problem right now everything else looks great. And I didnt notice in the last render, but you changed something to the blue part of the nacelles? (or was it there all along and i only noticed it now?)
Wow, Um, oops, I sounded like a jerk, I was tired, I meant I need to get tips FROM you. sorry
The wirting is now better adjusted to the curves of the hull.
I know that realistic space lighting would have dark shadows but as you’ve said it wouldn’t make a good render. I think that with the current light setup I found a compromise between realistic lighting and visibility of the entire ship.
I didn’t change much…probably it’s just the glow of those blue parts.
Another small update:
-Added a hull texture but it’s a little too subtle right now. Or what do you think?
Hull texture looks nice but a render from closer would be nice so that we can see the details of it better.
Definitely movie quality.
The newest pic has a higher resolution. That shows the details better.
UPDATE:
I worked a bit on the hull texture and added some decals here and there but not much really. I’m just not in the mood to work on the textures right now. That’s why I started painting the background for the final picutre. Still some work to do there but at least my ship has now some space to fly through
Movie quality achieved! 
The background is beautiful how long did it take?
Not quite movie quality yet but I’m definitely coming closer to that
The background is pretty simple. It’s done in GIMP. I’ve added several layers with noise and then started to vary on brightness and contrast for the stars. The nebula is painted with different cloud brushes I once downloaded.
If you’re interessted in painting such a background yourself then check out the following tutorial: http://gallery.artofgregmartin.com/tuts_arts/making_a_star_field.html
Wow thanks Anyway good luck in making it better, it aint gonna be easy!
Wow, great image already. I really like the windows and the details you put in some. Keep going
Yeah…the windows turned out surprisingly good. It’s actually pretty simple. I just put a plane behind each windows and mapped a texture of random Star Trek interior shots on them. I attached the texture for those who want to see it.
Attachments
Ah, the hull texture definately doesn’t stand up to this resolution, there are some pretty bad aliasing on the phaser banks unless you are using a low resolution buffer shadow which is making it look like that. I also liked the nacelles more when they were brighter. Maybe a comramise between what you have with the large picture and the one before.
Background looks sweet except the nebula looks a bit simple.