Thank you, guys, I’m working on mounting that thing into the hull, but in the meantime here are some renders with another board material. Is that better? Looks very technical and clean. Very modern. But also somewhat cold.
For the final decision it should perhaps be mounted. What do you think?
@Harleynut, the wires have just been something to visualize the work in progress 
You won’t see them once I mounted it.
@Xerubian, I had this level of detail in mind and I’m glad that you like it.
Well I know who I’m going to contact if I need some cool switches and gauges 
I can’t decide which version…wood or your new material I like best, both of them look good, and maybe your right, you need to mount the board in the ship and then make a call on it.
I love those little switches that have the pop up top in your middle render. Just curious… what does your rubber material node tree look like…In earlier renders I was admiring it… like what you used for the boots on some of the controls.
Yeah, the rubber material has turned out well. Often the simplest things are best. The fresnel node did the whole trick. I myself was very pleased with this material.
I’ll post some renders of the mounted cockpit later … my machine is working right now 
Well, I mounted the dashboard. Some things are left to do. But here are some renders to compare the two materials. I rendered them from inside the cockpit and from outside. The glass from the closed canopy filters a noticeable amount of light. Therefore everything inside the cockpit is much darker than it was in my last renders.
Now I’m curious, what you think. Both versions have their advantages.
Looks awesome,kinda reminds me of the Crab Sonoshee from Redline.
@minoribus you are the man. Thanks for taking the time to walk me through that baking. The cockpit is looking outstanding. Hell I can imagine settling into that seat right now. I’m just curious about what your graphics card is since you intend to animate all this. From looking at your wireframe you are obviously a good modeler but the subject doesn’t exactly lend itself to low poly. Hence my question about the graphics card and will you be able to stay in the GPU for animation? Once again thanks for the bake tutorial. That bake thing is going to be handy occasionally.
Try getting more reflections and specular patterns out of different directions of the carbon fiber. It looks to uniform or to dark.
Nice work on this! 
It really does change things once you have placed the council inside the cockpit. From the renders in post 44 a couple things immediately happen. You’ve lost much of the woodgrain in the wood version, and you’ve lost the texture you had going on the metal version (it looks more like regualr polished chrome) . I’m kind of leaning more to favoring the metal version, if you can find a way of getting the texture back.
Do you feel the control panel will be seen more from the inside or the outside of the ship in your scenes?
Awesome work on this. I love the console!!! I am having issues trying to pick between the wood and the carbon fiber.
The wood screams nautical to me, which is really cool for a submarine. But, the carbon fiber screams futuristic…which is also very cool. So, I guess you can, really, choose either…unless you can find a way to merge the two together.
I’ll be watching this for future updates. 
Hey, guys, thanks for the overwhelming feedback and your hints
I’m at work at the moment, so I’ll have to come back to it later. But I was offline this morning because my internet carrier had some problems, so please don’t wonder if I’m silent this evening. Then the problems of my carrier are still existent. Thanks again and more as soon as possible.
Thanks, DCBloodHound. A good finding. I didn’t know that film until now. But I googled it and yes, there are some quite amazing parallels. Even some of the buttons and switches are very much the same. Perhaps I can take some inspiration from this. 
You’re welcome and I’m glad if I could have been of some help!
And yes, I feel the same. Especially the handle cries „touch me“ 
I’m rendering this on a GTX Titan, which I bought after I had to face the insight, that I and Blender will spend some time together. And that was a well done spending
Cockpit and ship together are 700K vertices right now. That’s still manageable and I can reduce the subsurf modifiers when I render shots from a greater distance. Nearly everything has a subsurface modifier of 2 at the moment.
Thanks for this reference, martin.hedin. I see that I did this material completely wrong. I should have searched for it before I created it, but I was so sure that I knew it and could do it from mind. I’ll redo this. It’s quite a challenge to match this.
Thanks Vicky, a compliment from a master!
Yes, Harley, you are right, I wasn’t pleased at all when I saw, how much light the glass shader filters away. But I know what to do on this. The gloss is too high - so too much light bounces away from the glass instead of making it’s way through it. I must work on this to see the material through this glass as it is. But at the same time the glass shader should be still a glass shader.
I plan some little sequences from inside and to show details of the counsil like you did in your Unmanned Vengeance. But most of the times you will see the ship from outside.
Thanks tc2466. You made me laugh. I really have the same problem. But perhaps an inlay of wood in a better and darker carbon fiber material can solve this dilemma. That’s a good idea. So thanks for this suggestion.
I prefer the silver one. It has the more sportive style the whole ship goes for. I’m just amazed this is such an awsome work. Seriously. I just don’t have the time to read through all the details
Thank you, xerubian Thank you, guys.
I worked on several materials, changed the glass and the wood. And this way I got the textures again visible under the canopy. Here is the wooden version.
And I spent some time on the carbon fibre material. There is one thing I like concerning the wooden material. It gives a nice stage to the controls because it is darker. And the silver material was way too bright. I was always looking at the board, but not at the controls.
So I made this new carbon fibre material. I think it matches pretty nice the references and also the one which martin.hedin posted. Thanks for that again.
I think that’s the version to take
But of course I’m interested in your opinion.
Rats, your very positive changes just made the decision more difficult again Both versions look great!
Nice! I really like the futuristic retro look!
The new carbon fiber-one look’s good.
Now I like the carbon one lol Alls are awsome. How does that actually render? Cycles? How many samples? The speed in which you post the images is amazing.
Can you post a wire frame from the front?,i really like those curves.
Thank you all!
@Harleynut, yes, still difficult to choose between the materials, but I think I’ll go with the carbon fibre. It works good as a darker support structure for the controls.
@IconW and Xerubian, you encouraged me to choose the carbon one. I’m glad that you like the material. Here are the nodes for this. Most is done by a semi transparent and semi diffuse mask, that controls the specularity. After that I added an extra bit of overall gloss to it.
I used a free texture the fine site PremiumPixels.com and added an alpha channel to this pattern in the Gimp.
@Xerubian, I render with Cycles at 800 samples. Renders are done on my GTX Titan, which does this high sampled renders in ~2 to ~8 minutes. It’s depending of the angle, the lights and the amount of glossiness. And I must really say that my skills in creating materials got much better since I’m able to do fast test renders. The last render in this post was done in 1.42 minutes as the last one in a series of lighting tests
@DCBloodhound, thank you. Here is a wire of the ship’s front. Tell me if you want some more. It’s good that I cleaned up some crappy geometry around the cockpit this evening 
One thing I did this evening was to clean up some geometry. And I rebuilt the whole cockpit area. And here is a beauty render in it’s natural environment to entertain me and you Hope you like it in this early version, although I’m going to use the ship as dynamic paint brush on the ocean surface in the final shots to have some waves which are generated by the ship.
Awesome work,really nice geometry and topology you have going on there
