This image was based on an aircraft photo I saw on-line last week. And now, actually following the giant watermark, I don’t think I’ll be hurting for inspiration for a while.

The refit Enterprise is conspicuously brighter than the rest of the scene. I’m beginning to think there might be something to this “energy conserving surfacing” I’ve been hearing about.¹In short, objects shouldn’t reflect more light than they receive; an object that’s 20% reflective should be 80% diffuse, not 100% (Also, I finally understand what the “diffuse” surface setting is for). When I adjusted the Enterprise, I made it both very bright and very reflective. I’m going to have knuckle down and really learn about physically accurate surfacing (and all those exotic-sounding options in Lightwave’s nodal surfacing mode like “dielectric” and “sigma”) once this project is over, probably just in time for Newtek to release the new version of Lightwave with its physically-based rendering system, which will make everything I learned either super-useful or totally obsolete. Good times.