3DBack with something new after 15 years: TMP corridor set

seanr

Don't think anyone should have much trouble guessing what this is...


I'm in the process of teaching myself Blender (specifically Bforartists, had to manually compile v2.2.0 for Mac OS X). It's a pretty significant departure from what I'm used to (trueSpace 4.5 back in the day), but I'm gradually starting to get the hang of it.

count23

Wow, blast from the past. Welcome back.

FANGs

Welcome back! I'm really looking forward to see your first bridge in blender!

evil_genius_180

It's great to see you back at it, sear. As someone who also used Truespace in the beginning, Blender is definitely a whole other animal. But, that's not a bad thing, as it's got a lot more tools and is way more powerful than TS4.

Adam Warnock

Hi and welcome! Looks interesting, but I'm afraid I came to the site after you went on hiatus, so no idea what it is, unfortunately.

Rekkert

Ohhh, welcome back! I can't wait to see what you'll be able to create in Blender! I'm curious, what made you chose BforArtists specifically rather than mainline?

BolianAdmiral

Welcome back!

seanr

Bforartists has a MUCH better interface, though the pure Blender UI seems to have gotten better in 2.x. I actually do have both installed.

Bulkhead components in progress:


Test workspace render after final beveling and adding back in the wall panels:

seanr

First real render out of Blender/Bforartists:


Not bad for a first project with a new tool. Probably about 5 hours in that, mostly spent learning the software.

More to come on this; it isn't quite done yet.

Rekkert

Already looking great! TMP era?

Yeah, the interfaces are very close after the massive Blender 2.8 update, before that was a bigger pain to use.

Starkiller

Very, VERY nice. I have both Blender and BFA installed, but I want to complete what I'm
building before trying a new tool, which looks VERY intimidating. I'll likely start with BFA,
like you did. My poor memory (biological, not computer) can't handle the sheer number
of Hot Keys that Blender uses. BFA's Graphical UI is somewhat similiar to Modo's, so I
think it's to place to start. I'm also a trueSpace vet since version 3, and though I have
7.6, I've been away from tS for a long time. How do you find BFA? Not quite as
intimidating as it looks?

ashleytinger

Very cool.

Samurai

@seanr Keen to see how you get on with this. As a Mac user also in the early stages of figuring out Blender I'm off to check out bforartists- the "unique" workflow and UI of Blender is... challenging. Good start so far!

seanr

Samurai wrote: »

@seanr Keen to see how you get on with this. As a Mac user also in the early stages of figuring out Blender I'm off to check out bforartists- the "unique" workflow and UI of Blender is... challenging. Good start so far!

If you do try bforartists, you'll probably want to compile it manually from the v.2.2.0 tag in their git repo - they lost their Mac maintainer so the OS X binary they have is pretty stale. I'm going to help them get out an actual release at some point, but have a few loose ends to clean up first.

Starkiller wrote: »

I'm also a trueSpace vet since version 3, and though I have 7.6, I've been away from tS for a long time. How do you find BFA? Not quite as intimidating as it looks?

I may have actually started with 2.0 back in 1997. My first couple of versions were pirated before I could finally afford to buy it (I think 4.5 I actually paid for).

seanr

BTW, I wanted to point out that those light panels are actual translucent objects with area lights behind them. Blender's Cycles render engine actually handles them correctly, which to me is just amazing - I was never able to do anything like that before without faking it (though I got pretty good at that!). As a result of things like that, Blender's highly customizable shader system, and the vastly superior references I have now thanks to https://third-wave-design.com/ and others, this set is already far more accurate than my previous attempt at this set, even as good as that one was for the time.

Samurai

Oh boy. Best go download Xcode and find a tutorial, lol. Last time I typed a line of code I think it was ActionScript...

evil_genius_180

The corridor is looking great.

seanr wrote: »

I may have actually started with 2.0 back in 1997. My first couple of versions were pirated before I could finally afford to buy it (I think 4.5 I actually paid for).

I started with 2.0 also, but a few years after that. TS5 was out by the time I bought TS2, but it was more than I wanted to spend for something I wasn't sure I'd like. I also used 3.2, 4.2 and 7.6. (that last one was terrible) But, I switched to Lightwave several years ago. I've tried to get into Blender a few times, but I've never finished a project in it.

Freak

nice Looking corridor.
I am sure your going to be knocking these out like you did in TS in no time.

@Samurai Hey buddy long time no see, are you just lurking these days?

seanr

Another test viewport render:


That will also give you a little peek into how the set is constructed. I just started a full render a moment ago after fixing a couple of materials and one light that was a bit too bright; that's going to take at least a few hours, so hopefully it'll be waiting for me in the morning.

seanr

One thing to note from that screenshot - the red alert bar is constructed with a glass cover in front of a cylinder which is actually emitting light as a shader property. That's another thing I always wished I could do in trueSpace.

seanr

Red alert:

count23

Hey seanr. If it helps, I was part of a project over on trekbbs to gather all the data on the various star trek sets and their dimensions. I found a reference that had the _exact_ dimensions for these corridor arches and posted it up there (oddly it was a blueprint for Voyager's mess hall, and they didnt use those beams).

Link was here if you haven't seen it already: https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/set-blueprint-exchange.244483/

Also, you should jump on the discord, there's a lot of blender folks on there who'll be able to help bring you up to speed moving from truspace.

Martocticvs

Looking good. I built a corridor set inside my Constellation a few years back. Render times were awful back then - now with Redshift I'm sure they'd be quite breezy.

How long since you dropped truespace?

Rekkert

Looks great! How are you handling your render settings, if you don't mind me asking? When I render in high quality it only takes like half an hour, and I'm on a 4 years old GTX-1070. I can share with you the settings I use if you'd like to take a peak at that.

lewisniven

Rekkert wrote: »

Looks great! How are you handling your render settings, if you don't mind me asking? When I render in high quality it only takes like half an hour, and I'm on a 4 years old GTX-1070. I can share with you the settings I use if you'd like to take a peak at that.

Worth noting that the blender 2.9 Alpha has support for nVidia Optix on 10 series cards. I had a play yesterday but didn't spend a vast amount of time on it (GTX1080).

Tralfaz

How stable is bforartists? It looks like it is based on an alpha release of Blender.

Nice job on the corridor, btw.

seanr

Rekkert wrote: »

Looks great! How are you handling your render settings, if you don't mind me asking? When I render in high quality it only takes like half an hour, and I'm on a 4 years old GTX-1070. I can share with you the settings I use if you'd like to take a peak at that.

I'm on a 2015 Macbook Pro with 16GB of RAM. Unfortunately, I have neither the space nor the funny for a dedicated setup.

Here's a screenshot of my settings, for what it's worth:

Tralfaz wrote: »

How stable is bforartists? It looks like it is based on an alpha release of Blender.

Seems pretty stable to me, especially given that I had to build it manually to get the latest release for OS X (they lost their Mac maintainer several releases ago). I've been pushing it pretty hard and it hasn't done anything funky beyond the usual boolean wackiness you often get.

scifieric

Welcome back seanr, from yet another former TrueSpace user!

You are doing excellent work! Keep going.

ashleytinger

I think it's awesome how prolific it was back in the day. It's still what I use

seanr

Another preview render. I'll do a full render sometime tonight when I go to bed (whenever that may be... ).

seanr

Getting close to finished, at least for the radial corridor. I'll likely rearrange the pieces to match the sound stage plans, but most of the mesh is there now.