I finished this a little bit ago, but haven’t uploaded it till now. There are obviously lots of details still missing (like the pylons connecting the nacelles to the hull!) but I wanted to try out this engine material effect. Sort of getting ahead of myself.

I think this technique was from a post on SciFi-Meshes.com, but I’m not sure about that. The effect is based on the idea that the warp engines should show not just a brighter strip of light in the middle of the engine grating surface, but actually show the warp plasma or whatever it is glowing deep inside the engine. This way what you see changes depending on the viewing angle, and theoretically looks more “real.”

To that end, each of the engine cutouts has a concave shell of polygons placed inside of it, and the “stripe of glowing stuff” material is mapped to this shell. Now when it’s seen from above, like the starboard nacelle here, the angle of the glow is different from a more straight-on view, like you can see in the port nacelle. You can see a close-up of what I’m talking about in image #210a on the Equinox Exterior page.