I would be too if I hadn‘t already done one recently 😁
And yours is beautiful. You also did that other ship that I'm going to be doing soon, the Romulan Bird of Prey. I've done a couple on the past, but I don't have those models anymore.
I bashed together a Hermes class scout. For those of you doing the math, yes, it’s the same design as the Saladin class destroyer. The main difference is that the destroyer variant has more weapons. However, in canon, there are two scout ships that have been name whose class was never revealed, but their names and registries come from the Starfleet Technical manual. Those ships are the USS Columbia NCC-621 and the USS Revere, NCC-595. In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the Columbia is being ordered to rendezvous with the Revere during the establishing shot of the Epsilon IX station. So, I chose to make mine one of those scouts, the Revere.
The build was, obviously, mostly just rearranging parts from my Constitution class, with only a few parts to make. Then I made some new texture maps for the changed name and registry. I also moved one of the lines on the neck forward, to between the vents and the windows. So, it’s pretty simple, but it adds another ship to the fleet.
So, I had a slight meltdown the other day. I bought and installed a brand new 2TB SSHD last week and decided I was going to go to one operating system, that being Windows 10. So, I got the drive installed and got Windows installed and everything was going well. Well enough, that is. I couldn’t help but notice that Windows 10 is sometimes sluggish and just plain slow at times. I have a plenty powerful enough computer and I installed the OS myself, so there was no bloatware on there. No bloatware, that is, except for Windows itself. I determined the issue was Windows 10, so I fragged it. As luck would have it, Ubuntu and its derivatives released a new version on Friday, so I downloaded and installed Xubuntu 20.04 where Windows 10 had been. Needless to say, that runs smooth and fast. The only issue with Linux is, no Lightwave. I checked because I recently got an e-mail about Lightwave 2020 being out, but it still doesn’t have Linux support (nor was I expecting it to.) So, it’s back to Blender.
So, I downloaded Blender 2.82a and started checking it out. Of course, the last version I used was 2.79b, so there are a lot of changes. I decided something I definitely wanted to do was import the Enterprise I made last year. It’s better than building a new one. I used one of my laptops, which has Windows 10 Professional on it, to export the mesh to .fbx format, which Blender 2.82a happily imported. I had to do this twice, because the way I modeled some of my window cuts didn’t import well into Blender, and it was easier to fix them in Lightwave. Anyway, this was the result:
Not bad at all, I can certainly work with it. Of course, the materials were a mess. Now, this wasn’t the first attempt at doing this, I spent way too long dorking around with Blender’s UV mapping, which I’ve never liked. After that, I decided to just re-import the unmodified .fbx file and start over. That render was the result. After messing around with the materials for a while, this is where I am with it:
It’s coming along. At least it’s not all flat paint. 😉 The bussard collectors are getting there, but they’re not quite there yet. Now, there are a lot of things to like about Blender 2.82a. For one thing, the collections are really nice. You can just add stuff to a collection. For example, I have a collection called “Enterprise,” with sub collections for the saucer, sngine section and nacelles. I can make anything from any collection invisible, or just make the whole collection invisible. I like that a lot better than messing with layers, which both Lightwave and earlier versions of Blender use. I also find a lot of the material tools to be really intuitive, perhaps more so than Lightwave. So, I’m liking it so far.
Still to do on the ship: markings and texturing. I don’t think I’ll texture the markings, as I did before. I think I’ll just model them. Honestly, it’s not much more work than the textures, and one of the main issues I was having was getting my markings to line up where I wanted them. The saucer was pretty easy, but the engineering section gave me fits. So, I’ll just model those and shrink wrap them to the hull. After I get this ship done, I have a few more on one of my older hard drives to grab.
Yeah Windows can be a pain the in arse.
My father-in-law gave me a PC he no longer wanted (only had it 6 months and not very powerful.) He had wiped the PC before giving it to me.
But I found it to be so slow I could not do anything with it. It was taking 15 mins just open up Photoshop, and it would freeze to the point were you could not do anything while it possessing. I removed Win 10 on it and put windows 7 and it now works with no issues.
On the subject of Blender 2.8 being different, Loop Cut & Slide doesn't seem to work the same way anymore. That's a huge pain for me, as that was one of my go-to tools.
Yeah Windows can be a pain the in arse.
My father-in-law gave me a PC he no longer wanted (only had it 6 months and not very powerful.) He had wiped the PC before giving it to me.
But I found it to be so slow I could not do anything with it. It was taking 15 mins just open up Photoshop, and it would freeze to the point were you could not do anything while it possessing. I removed Win 10 on it and put windows 7 and it now works with no issues.
Despite Microsoft pushing it, some computers should never have been "upgraded" to Win10, they just can't handle it. I liked Win7, but I was plagued by BSOD issues that lead to me discontinuing using it. It's good that you still find it useful, though. Just be careful with it, it's reached End of Life and won't be getting anymore security updates ever.
I got my saucer markings all done. The name and registry are where they should be. I still need to add those gray and yellow panels that are where the underside windows are, but that won’t take long. I also further tweaked my bussard collectors and added a material to my interior boxes. Like I did with Lightwave, this is achieved by mixing procedural textures. I find mixing really simple in Blender. I have 4 different procedural textures mixed, each one is plugged into a color mixing node. Each node has 2 color slots, so I have 2 color mixing nodes plugged into a third, then that’s plugged into the color channel of my material. Overall, I like the effect. I went with different colors to simulate that thing in TOS where different rooms were different colors (usually achieved with lighting.)
Ignore anything in this thread that was being done in Blender. I had a meltdown a few months back with desktop Linux and trying to find a distribution that worked for my needs without something going wrong, so I switched back to Windows 10. This means I'm back to using Lightwave 2018. The reasoning on this is simple. I paid a lot of money for Lightwave, so I'm running it.
As I indicated in the finished art post I did earlier, I converted a few of my older ships to Lightwave 2018. This basically entails completely redoing the materials, as Lightwave 2018’s render engine is designed to use Principled BSDF materials and older versions of the software used different materials and a different render engine. These models were made in Lightwave 10 about 5-6 years ago.
I’m seriously considering redoing the Equinox (and not calling it that) as that was designed to be a ship that was a later TOS era, almost to the TMP time frame ship, hence the details. But, I’d prefer to do a model that looks like an older ship. Besides, I haven’t done that style of hull in ages and it’s a fun style to do. Another thing I’m considering is rigging up models for animation. For the most part, these models wouldn’t be hard to animate or take a long time, but the bussard collectors are a problem. They’re done practically with modeled lights and mirrors, and a lot of light refraction. The refraction is what is causing the noise that is visible on the Erickson render. This can be done away with, or at least greatly reduced, but increasing the anti aliasing to the level required results in really long render times. So, I’m probably going to have to fake the look of what’s inside the bussard collectors with a texture, which isn’t all that hard to do. I’ve done it before, all I have to do is animate it, render it to a .avi file and then use that as a applied to a dome. For animation, this will work fine. Really, it would probably be OK for still images, so I’ll have to decide after I do it if I want to keep the practical bussards or just go to the textured version.
Whatever works for you! There's a reason some of us are stuck in the mud using software from the 90s
Heh, Truespace. Ah, I remember the days. Doesn't even have an edge rounder. (at least, TS3 and 4 don't) I used to sometimes export stuff to .obj, import it into Wings and use the edge rounder, then export it back to .obj and import it into Truespace. Still, it was decent software, at least until the last version. TS7 was a hot mess. scifieric knows a thing or two about Truespace too.
Well, I set up a scene and rendered an image when I got home, so it wasn't a total loss. I do want to get the main hull for the Reliant style ship started soon, though.
My goodness, 26 days later and I still haven't started on that Reliant style hull. On the other hand....
I’ve been fighting a lot of noise when I render my TOS ships, especially where the light from the bussard collectors is hitting the hull. An idea struck me and I finally figured out what the problem was; the lights inside the bussard collectors were too strong. In an effort to make them more visible and pop more, I really cranked up the luminosity setting, which is what was causing the noise. So, I went in and backed down the luminosity setting a lot on all of the lights and I changed the dome settings to make the lights more visible. I’m pretty happy with the end result.
The old bussard collector:
The new one:
I don’t feel I lost a lot in the look of the bussard, in fact I think it looks a lot better, but I lost a lot of the noise. The light hitting the hull was too strong anyway, that’s what caused the noise. Now it’s there but it’s pretty subtle.
Here’s how the Erickson looks with the new bussards:
So, yeah, I’m pretty happy with the results. I have the bussards looking how I want them, light is still hitting the hull and there’s a lot less noise.
Posts
One of us! One of us! One of us! One of us!
I would be too if I hadn‘t already done one recently 😁
And yours is beautiful.
The build was, obviously, mostly just rearranging parts from my Constitution class, with only a few parts to make. Then I made some new texture maps for the changed name and registry. I also moved one of the lines on the neck forward, to between the vents and the windows. So, it’s pretty simple, but it adds another ship to the fleet.
So, I had errors on my nacelle end caps:
I hate errors. These were caused by Lightwave flipping faces. I fixed them in both this model and my Enterprise model:
Thanks Eric.
So, I downloaded Blender 2.82a and started checking it out. Of course, the last version I used was 2.79b, so there are a lot of changes. I decided something I definitely wanted to do was import the Enterprise I made last year. It’s better than building a new one. I used one of my laptops, which has Windows 10 Professional on it, to export the mesh to .fbx format, which Blender 2.82a happily imported. I had to do this twice, because the way I modeled some of my window cuts didn’t import well into Blender, and it was easier to fix them in Lightwave. Anyway, this was the result:
Not bad at all, I can certainly work with it. Of course, the materials were a mess. Now, this wasn’t the first attempt at doing this, I spent way too long dorking around with Blender’s UV mapping, which I’ve never liked. After that, I decided to just re-import the unmodified .fbx file and start over. That render was the result. After messing around with the materials for a while, this is where I am with it:
It’s coming along. At least it’s not all flat paint. 😉 The bussard collectors are getting there, but they’re not quite there yet. Now, there are a lot of things to like about Blender 2.82a. For one thing, the collections are really nice. You can just add stuff to a collection. For example, I have a collection called “Enterprise,” with sub collections for the saucer, sngine section and nacelles. I can make anything from any collection invisible, or just make the whole collection invisible. I like that a lot better than messing with layers, which both Lightwave and earlier versions of Blender use. I also find a lot of the material tools to be really intuitive, perhaps more so than Lightwave. So, I’m liking it so far.
Still to do on the ship: markings and texturing. I don’t think I’ll texture the markings, as I did before. I think I’ll just model them. Honestly, it’s not much more work than the textures, and one of the main issues I was having was getting my markings to line up where I wanted them. The saucer was pretty easy, but the engineering section gave me fits. So, I’ll just model those and shrink wrap them to the hull. After I get this ship done, I have a few more on one of my older hard drives to grab.
My father-in-law gave me a PC he no longer wanted (only had it 6 months and not very powerful.) He had wiped the PC before giving it to me.
But I found it to be so slow I could not do anything with it. It was taking 15 mins just open up Photoshop, and it would freeze to the point were you could not do anything while it possessing. I removed Win 10 on it and put windows 7 and it now works with no issues.
Your Enterprise is looking good.
Your Enterprise is looking good though. Keep it up.
On the subject of Blender 2.8 being different, Loop Cut & Slide doesn't seem to work the same way anymore. That's a huge pain for me, as that was one of my go-to tools.
Despite Microsoft pushing it, some computers should never have been "upgraded" to Win10, they just can't handle it. I liked Win7, but I was plagued by BSOD issues that lead to me discontinuing using it. It's good that you still find it useful, though. Just be careful with it, it's reached End of Life and won't be getting anymore security updates ever.
Remembering how to do text in Blender was a whole lot of fun, by the way. (fun like stubbing your toe is fun)
Thanks. It's based on Charles Casimiro's schematics, but I think I changed a few things for accuracy.
As I indicated in the finished art post I did earlier, I converted a few of my older ships to Lightwave 2018. This basically entails completely redoing the materials, as Lightwave 2018’s render engine is designed to use Principled BSDF materials and older versions of the software used different materials and a different render engine. These models were made in Lightwave 10 about 5-6 years ago.
I’m seriously considering redoing the Equinox (and not calling it that) as that was designed to be a ship that was a later TOS era, almost to the TMP time frame ship, hence the details. But, I’d prefer to do a model that looks like an older ship. Besides, I haven’t done that style of hull in ages and it’s a fun style to do. Another thing I’m considering is rigging up models for animation. For the most part, these models wouldn’t be hard to animate or take a long time, but the bussard collectors are a problem. They’re done practically with modeled lights and mirrors, and a lot of light refraction. The refraction is what is causing the noise that is visible on the Erickson render. This can be done away with, or at least greatly reduced, but increasing the anti aliasing to the level required results in really long render times. So, I’m probably going to have to fake the look of what’s inside the bussard collectors with a texture, which isn’t all that hard to do. I’ve done it before, all I have to do is animate it, render it to a .avi file and then use that as a applied to a dome. For animation, this will work fine. Really, it would probably be OK for still images, so I’ll have to decide after I do it if I want to keep the practical bussards or just go to the textured version.
Thanks. I may start on something when I get home. Or not. It's up in the air.
Heh, Truespace. Ah, I remember the days. Doesn't even have an edge rounder.
I’ve been fighting a lot of noise when I render my TOS ships, especially where the light from the bussard collectors is hitting the hull. An idea struck me and I finally figured out what the problem was; the lights inside the bussard collectors were too strong. In an effort to make them more visible and pop more, I really cranked up the luminosity setting, which is what was causing the noise. So, I went in and backed down the luminosity setting a lot on all of the lights and I changed the dome settings to make the lights more visible. I’m pretty happy with the end result.
The old bussard collector:
The new one:
I don’t feel I lost a lot in the look of the bussard, in fact I think it looks a lot better, but I lost a lot of the noise. The light hitting the hull was too strong anyway, that’s what caused the noise. Now it’s there but it’s pretty subtle.
Here’s how the Erickson looks with the new bussards:
So, yeah, I’m pretty happy with the results. I have the bussards looking how I want them, light is still hitting the hull and there’s a lot less noise.