Wow, you have put a lot of thought into trying to make sense and bring order out of Glen Larson's mess. Your work is highly impressive, but this is NOT what I am envisioning. I am ready to giveup all the discussion about what is "Canon BSG" scale and how the innards of a battlestar might be. I am probably just going to start from scratch and just build the various parts of the ship as needed to get the job of rendering done without worrying about making too much sense of it all. This BSG stuff is all in fun anyway, so let's go do it and have fun! But I hate the rivets! That is one silly aspect that will not make it into any of my meshes or renders. But thanks for the drawings and schematics. This will help me greatly in deciding how to construct the various structures I will need to render specialized cgi shots
I have almost settled on doubling the battlestar scale to 2 miles in length in order to fit large heavy transports inside making sense. The scene of an eastern alliance destroyer comfortably parked on the landing bay main flight deck suprised the heck out of me when I 1st saw it. Taranis, your layout is much too small to accomodate such large ships. I prefer the new BSG battlestar's landing bay in size and layout. The Colonial One vessel easily fits inside. Again, it'll all work out in the finished render, you'll see
I am looking forward to your renders showing your ideas.
Yes, my battlestar will be around 20 million polys completed, but NEVER will 20 million polys be rendered at the same time! Only those parts of the mesh involved need be rendered. The inside scenes ( landing bay, launch tubes, bridge etc.) have nothing to do with rendering the outside of the ship, so those meshes can be equally large and detailed. Most of my shots will be multiple pass composites on my render farm anyway. And I plan to move to a GPU-based render farm as soon as I think the software is mature enough. This will speed up the rendering 10 fold as compared to a quadcore basd render node. That is the same as having 800 render nodes of my current 20 cpu-based units ( they're not even dual core processors). I'm drooling at the possibilities...
