Ah! I'll have a look at that new model of yours in just a few.I also have a little something for us to watch. Last night I finished a sample animation to show off my "scout cruiser" model. There have been a few improvements to the mesh since the picture I posted on page 2 of this thread. My main reasons for rendering this ten-second spot were to test a new seamless "splotchy" background starfield I had made, to test the random setting of the glow used in the jet exhaust (note that it flickers), to try a method of layering different glow colors to make a gradient in the jet, and to see if the looping rotation of the scanner had any skips between loops. I'm satisfied with the results, but I don't think the starfield is quite right. The stars themselves aren't sharp enough and the blue blotches aren't as prevalent as in the TV show. Currently I'm using a 2000x2000-pixel image wrapped spherically on a sky object. The image itself has a gradient to black on the top and bottom 250 pixels to hide the polar distortions caused by the wrapping. I can share it too if anyone is interested.In any case, here's the animation for your viewing pleasure:
http://brad.project-think.com/starfleet ... r.mov(1.05 MB, requires QuickTime)Oh, and how does this tie in to the game? Well, there are separate sprites for ship running lights and engine glow that are multiplied into the display at runtime. So, I'll need the jet for that. Also, I've found that in place of a static picture, I can use a QuickTime video in the box where you would purchase the ship or hail someone flying that kind of ship. This would be a fun feature to exploit, but I would want to keep any videos small and highly compressed so the plugin would not grow to some ridiculous size like 100 MB.Okay... now to try Andy's file...Well, after watching C4D completely lock up twice and having to kill its processes

I found that it was choking when it couldn't find the texture files. How strange! C4D usually just skips past any missing files. No problem; I just removed the textures from the materials before trying to render again.Anyhow, it looks nice. After examining the various objects with the polygon tool, it actually gave me an idea for a new tutorial, one that won't necessarily affect the appearance of the ship's meshes, but will probably reduce CPU load and give you a quicker and more responsive working environment by reducing excessive or unnecessary points and polygons. There are also a few bugs with some polygon normals being reversed, but I can explain all that later.The design itself, though, looks pretty solid overall. My hands are already pretty full with these other models for now; so, you can continue to tweak this one or work on others or whatnot in the mean time.