Airship turntable

I finished modelling the airship and rendered this turntable animation took a few hours to render and there are no textures or additional lighting in the scene just FG!

Normal Mapping

In order to reduce render times when the detail isn't needed I've begun the process of normal mapping the details from a high res version of the airship to a low res version. I've been testing out the process on the bridge of the airship. I had to look up several tutorials on the web, I think its a good idea to watch and read a few different tutorials so you get a better understanding of what you are doing rather than just blindly following the directions. The two most useful ones can be found here:

http://youtu.be/2P6C8ZodYnA
http://www.3dtutorialzone.com/tutorial?id=10

What Ive found is that your scene file size can be reduced dramatically but when you start rendering with FG and GI with mental ray production quality you're only saving a 10 or 20 seconds a frame. This could be a problem with my settings I'll have a look into.

Below is an image comparing the results of the normal mapping.

As you can see the low-poly model has lost some definition in the panels but this can be corrected through tweaking the normal map in photoshop or by adding a displacement map to the model. Below is the normal map used in this case.

So next for me to do is to explore the settings thoroughly to see if I can reduce the render times more substantially otherwise it won't be worth remodelling the ship to do this.

More of the airship

Heres a few other pics - this is the hanger bay, there will be animated images on the displays and some nice glow lighting coming off them onto the characters.

airship gunplatform

This is the bridge and gun platform