USS Atlantis - Kusanagi Class

This one has been a long time in the making. I started this ship back in 2019 while working on the USS Enterprise. It started as an exercise to see if I could take an existing Star Trek design, in this case the Akira Class, designed originally by Alex Yeager, to a different era in Star Trek, in this case the Movie era design language established in Motion Picture and the following movies. After some initial concepts, I shelved the project for a few months before taking it up again. At some point, I plan on doing a proper write up of the whole process as there's quite a lot of ground to cover.

The name USS Atlantis is actually in reference to the space shuttle Atlantis and the registry NCC-1933 is also a nod to the 33 flights space shuttle Atlantis did. Like the original, the name of the class is a nod to a famous Anime, in this case Kusanagi is the last name of the main character in Ghost in the Shell.

For some technical points, the ship was rendered with V-Ray, but I was having trouble rendering the planet with V-ray. It doesn't have a proper volumetric shader plus the interaction between the atmosphere and clouds was prohibitively slow. Thankfully, Corona does have the needed shader and it renders this type of thing a lot faster. In addition, this is the first project that I render with ACES which is proving to be a great thing as I get much better color response.