Back to school

When I woke up this morning, I wasn't sure how I felt about the build. I thought that I'd sunk a few hours in yesterday where I was throwing crap at the model in terms of discordant and ill-fitting additions. The classic problem occurs when my enthusiasm and eye for detail are lost. I grabbed a coffee and had a look at the previous night's progressive renders. Actually, the issues were nothing more tidy-up can't fix.

School!

My two children returned to school today, giving me a clear run at continuing the "mini" project, which has surpassed most projects I've done before. In terms of built effort, this looks like the most significant model I've ever built. I use a lot of instancing and mirroring, which means keeping the file size down. I'm organizing the outliner far better than in the past—hierarchies and everything!

Engine clean-up

The thruster blocks are shorter and mount deeper within the engineering block recesses. I added struts to the docking arm. I quickly disliked these struts because they were sloppily cut.

Another kitbash addition! Docking arms from an Orbital Elements vehicle, fit nicely here.

I started to put some cables onto the engineering block. I'll go back and add more if I don't think it's overly cluttered. Now, it's time to turn my attention to the emergency ejection hatch for the stutter warp drive.

A door in the engineering block to push the stutterwarp drive out, if it decides to go critical...

The hatch was restarted twice. Reasonably happy with it now.

Lifeboats rebuilt. They'll pass for now. I'm eager to paint them orange.

I'm still not there. Tomorrow, I will complete the main build. Some additional external vehicles need to be attached to the front spin ring. However, most of the work remains on the front end. A nip-and-tuck of those discordant elements will get us to the finish line.

Then I'll need to decide if I go into texturing and lighting before completing the rather large docked sub-vessel, and exploration vessel that goes ahead to scout. I could do with a change from modelling before starting that.

Oops Moment

I had a fat-finger moment earlier today. I somehow turned on a Gismo change that stopped my scale tool from working. Instead, the tool only adjusted a coordinates gizmo I'd somehow turned on. I spent about twenty minutes trying to work out what I'd done.

Answer:
It turns out that I'd used a random keyboard shortcut to enable Origins-only for the transform tools. I disabled it using a checkbox under the Tool N tab.