OK, here's what I did. I edited my spec maps and added 40% brightness to the lighter parts of the aztec but left all of the other panels alone, including the smaller, brighter ones. This makes the aztec itself stand out more and the smaller, brighter panels stand out less, at least against the brighter parts of the aztec.
This is pretty much as good as it gets. I'm not spending the rest of my week tweaking the textures on this ship, so this will more than likely be the final texture revision as I'm pretty happy with it, more so than I was with the previous versions.
And a little image I cooked up with a planet and a flare. It's basically a fancy beauty shot, but I need to download and convert a couple Lightwave Klingon and Romulan meshes before I get more fancy with the images (or build some more models, but the download thing is faster and will happen first.
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