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Hey Cafe Last night @VECTOR told me what he had been up to these last few weeks, and that him and @everfresh been secretly organizing a donation fund for me and my mum while we're getting through some difficult bits. What can I say - I am absolutely blown away by the kindness and support of people here in this amazing community. There are simply no words that could convey how grateful we are to everyone that helped or left a message. Thank you so much. We will be making a donation to the Phyllis Tuckwell Hospice Foundation who are desperately starved of resources but still do incredible work and make a massive difference to the lives of people dealing with terminal illness and their families. Love and light, J

Okay...this is weird. All I did was shut off the normal channel and turn it back on again, and the floating windows disappeared. Interesting. I zoomed back a bit and you can really tell now that the lights seem a bit more connected to the hull. Just compare the lights at the bottom of the image where the normal map is applied to those at the top where the are not applied. Great suggestion!!! Dave

If I have your attention, I must be doing something right! Good suggestion on the doors --- I never even considered that approach...you almost make me want to redo them one more time. Relative to the port holes--- Another excellent suggestion. Yes...they do look a bit floaty and that did bother me a bit. I was just happy to finally get a pattern that made sense, so I was going to live with it. But I am eager to try out your suggestion … so I will get it to it tonight after work. Normally, I hate bump maps in non-organic models. They just don't read well to me. Normal maps tend to be better. Let me try both (I think there is a H2N shader that converts any image to a normal map). If normal maps don't work out as well, then blur in the bump map will probably take a bit of the curse off a bump map - that and the new parallax bump capability in C4D. Thanks again....in one post, you gave me two suggestions that in my wildest imagination I never would have considered!!! Dave

Dammit, I've been itching to help you out with those loading bay doors, but clients have been keeping me a bit nose-to-the-grindstone recently, so I haven't had much time to experiment on your behalf. But I did wonder if one viable approach wouldn't be making them in 3 vertical sections (top and bottom plates and the middle bits) so that your edge loops could be independent of each other. Just a thought - I see you've pretty much sorted them anyway :) Something else has caught my eye if you are interested... Those little luminant port-holes there - they are very 'on the surface' at the moment. What about using an inverse of the luminance map (possibly minutely blurred) to subtly bump those windows into the mainframe ever-so-slightly ? That might add another little contributory factor towards the perceived 'bigness'... what do you think ? CBR

The Dock doors start to take shape.....finally getting something that I am happy with. At this rate, I should be done with this project by next Christmas...but I am having a blast and looking forward to every challenge and utter frustration along the way. Dave