A >small< ship, but still no stars to steer her by

[classicdrogn]

This is where you power up all of your old computers and let them render one frame each...

Theoretically, yes, but I've never figured out how to get Blender to work with a networked render farm. I only have my mother's old laptop and a Chromebook that's about ten years newer but no more powerful, anyway. Regardless of that, staring at the frames updating two swatches at a time of course made me notice all the things that were wrong with it and slowly go into a frenzy wanting to fix them, as usual, so I ended up aborting the render at around frame 150 and spending the rest of the time between then and now doing a scattershot of fixes and additions here and there, I think one of which would actually have been visible

No, wait, two, because I moved the turbolift shaft as well as the vertical door between the shuttle bay and the workshop/hangar, mainly because the turbolift was what was making that squish down way too close to the matching doors into Engineering. Which I also stretched two meters longer so things would have more room on that side of the saucer separation line, except that put the warp plasma conduits on the wrong side of the nacelle pylon frame so I had to reroute them, which freed up a straight shot from the corridor over the nacelle with the airlock to Engineering that would hold a regular ship's corridor rather than just a Jeffries tube, which was good, but moving the turbolift meant I had to shorten the deflector gribblies at the front and rearrange the Deflector Control room and connecting corridor as well, which was a pain, and rebuild the shuttle bay tractor control booth, which was annoying, and then I realized I needed to rescale all three hundred or so cargo containers and oh fuck that I'm deleting them all and restacking from scratch, and so on and so on. And I put the tail back on the nyancat shuttle and switched its nacelles to match the ship's new design as well, and finished closing up the hole in the "armpits" under the nacelles, and, and, and.

And I turned the goddamn Ambient Occlusion way down because it turns out that's what makes the renders so grainy all the time, but that meant I had to adjust all the lights as well, and, and, and...

So, a frustrating session this time. At least I did get the shuttlebay ceiling/workshop floor bits all kicked into shape, and the ramp to join the floor heights between the workshop and engineering, which is also the boarding ramp if you separate and land the saucer, and I could still tell the visual joke by rendering some stills like a storyboard or comic strip I suppose.

The dolly-in through the frame worked pretty well in the bit of animation that did finish, too, and I know how I did that for later, not that it's anything but the intended effect of my standard camera rig with a parent empty and a tracked "what you're looking at" empty. The first makes for easy fly-arounds or move-to/-away by putting it at the point you want to turn around or move toward/away from and rotating or scaling, the second makes sure you never have to piss around with pointing the camera at what you want, just slap the target empty down and you're done. Very obvious when you look at or just hear about it to the point it's probably just part of the general "yeah, this is how you set up a camera to not have to dick around, didn't you know that?" knowledge base, but I only came up with it a couple years ago myself.

Meh. Rambling. Time for bed.

edit: STAINED GLASS FIREPLACE
Two Forward. It must happen. Bed. Sleepy. More incoherent than Shatner.