Aegis Reclaimer - Cutaway Interior View

As a follow up to my earlier bi-sectioned Pisces, here is the indomitable Reclaimer, sliced down the middle for a look inside.

Tech: Well this project is coming along nicely. Still hacking at an early tool for building out ships, both inside and out.It's gotten to the point where it imports things fairly well enough to build out and entire Reclaimer with only some amount of annoying cleanup. And by everything, I mean almost everything down to the props on the Rec Room table, though the table itself was mysteriously missing (this also explains the -3 mood debuff for the crew)

To slice everything in half I placed a perspective camera and set the near clip value to coincide with the middle of the ship. This gives me a nice cross section that still accounts for all the hidden geometry when it comes to lighting and shading. There are several more cameras, each setup with another slice and transparency. Once rendered, each rendered slice was brought into photoshop and layered onto each other, with a mask to reveal or hide certain sections. Rendering a cryptomatte image made the selection and masking a whole lot easier.

Art: What the tool doesn't convert over is lighting, so I next needed to figure that out. First, emissive shaders were used to give lights to lighting textures. I next made a node group to convert the RGB value of the light to a blackbody lighting temperature. This gave the lighting a bit more natural looks without being overly saturated. Additional lights were added to balance the levels of certain sections. Test renders of rooms were done to try and match the in-game look of the Reclaimer, though I think they turned out even better than in-engine. Keep an eye out, maybe I'll post those as well.

Other: George Hull did an amazing job with the Reclaimer concept. I don't know if he worked on the interior (I'm guessing there's a separate team for this), but its internal brooding AEGS aesthetic nicely complements its external hulking frame. As much as I love shiny new alien ships, I really hope we get to see more ships in this style.