Some More Detail and Some Lighting for the Latest Mesh

My latest spaceship model got a couple of hours work tonight, where I messed around with positioning some lights and adding some irregular-shaped panels. It is still very basic and smooth looking, so it will need a lot more irregular bits added and a bunch of little lights to pick them out.

so now it has a couple of big panels on the nose and some light spilling out of the nose as well. I positioned the lights as the fancy took me, with orange and red for the nose opening and a nice warm yellow for the cockpit.

This forum discussion shows a spaceship going through the same process. The spaceship starts out pleasing, but smooth, and gradually more and more detail is added. The spaceship in the forum looks quite realistic, with giant heatsinks and no attempt at making it aerodynamic. My spaceship is much less realistic, more like an airplane. Nevertheless, the theory is the same. The more detail and interest I add to the model, the bigger andd more realistic it will seem.

I am a big fan of the spaceships of the TTA, probably because of my childhood in 70s/80s Britain. Most of these spaceships were re-purposed from illustrations that had been done for book covers at the time, and they were all extremely colorful.The Wikipedia page about the colorful spaceships of the TTA explains it all nicely.

The TTA book I had was Starliners, published in 1980. The pink, yellow and red color scheme of the spaceship on the cover may be a little too bright for my taste, but perhaps I should push my comfort envelope. I'll probably go with something bright but less pink, like this lovely yellow spaceship by Chris Foss.