This turned out about 4,000x awesomer than I’d expected it to. While it feels a bit odd giving the Sabrosa it’s own “money shot” page, the scenes need to segue somehow… and more importantly, the Cheops already has one at the beginning of chapter one and the Daedalus has its own moneyshot later on… so now the book is even-up for the major vehicles. Huzzah.

The wireframe bit, in addition to looking awesome, is also thematically connected to convergence -19-. If I’d thought this all the way through instead of shooting from the hip with “ooo, pretty!,” I probably would have used a cel shader instead of a wireframe render. I use cell with the am insertion panels and daedalus status displays and it’s great for what it is, but after remembering I could have gone that route I’m still of the opinion that the wireframe is prettier in some cases. Namely this one.

Also, I kinda wish I’d found out about Mental Ray a year or two before I finally sat down to figure it out – this is the sort of render that takes Scanline a tremendous amount of time to process, whereas MR gave me useable results in an evening. And! Unlike the first page of this scene, I didn’t have to split it up into multiple blowups – a thing that’s occasionally required regardless of renderer, but a thing MR reliably screws up. \o/

I have a small pile of freelance I’ve been putting off in order to get this scene done – now that it is, it’s back to the non-ATC art grind. The rest of the chapter will wrap later this month, or early next.