The start of texturing

I started to work on the textures before the work sneaks up on me and I run out of time. My original idea was to use Substance Painter to create the whole texture however I felt this would have been too difficult to create certain things like the blue parts to the warp nacelles and the escape pods so I decided to create the base in Substance and then take the maps into Photoshop to add the details. I first created the name and registry, as this is a important part of the ship I had to see how it looked. The result was less than pleasing. I managed to find the font used for ship names on the show however when I added it to the UV map it pixelated a little too much for my liking and so I decided to create an Alpha for it so I could have it in the maximum detail allowed, I also did this for the registry underneath. My next step was creating the nacelle glow which I made using a circular gradient and transforming it to fit the nacelle, this was the same method for the bussard collectors too. I then made the entrance to the shuttle bay, using Voyagers shuttle bay and a little bit of Prometheus reference I created a sort of 'welcome mat' for the shuttle bay and added the ship name and registry. I added some detailing to the nacelle pylons and normal mapped them as they are raised on the actual ship as are the escape pods which I made from scratch by simply making a hexagon with a red cuboid cut to make corners and S.O.S stenciled on. The deflector was fairly simple, I made a light blue circle, cut out the middle and put an Outer Glow effect to replicate the reference image.

My next step is to create the dreaded panel gaps. It is going to need to be very precise and fit both the UV map and the actual curvature of the model and I will need to come up with a way to create it so that it looks at least similar to the reference images. The Aztec detailing shouldn't be too hard as I have created them from scratch before however getting them to link together will be a challenge. I then want to make the textures animated, mostly the impulse and warp engines and the deflector lighting up. I have experience with animating texture glow in Max during college and hopefully Maya will allow me to do something similar so I can get the slowly powering up effect I want and the warp engine glow before the ship rockets off at the end of the show reel.