3DAge of Warp - Cartoon

mavek

I would like to share some of my work in progress. I have been toying with an idea for a Star Trek show fan film for years. I was always interested in a trek cartoon, until last year that hadn't been heard of in 40 years.

Any way, I have been playing around in Blender for years, but never modelled any thing. I wanted a toon looking trek ship for ages. There are some interesting shaders and using freestyle to get a fun look. However trying to back convert an existing mesh into something freestyle friendly is almost as much work as starting from scratch, so I did that instead.

My in world head canon is that there was a trek cartoon tv show attempted in the early 90s, after Star Trek VI, called Age of Warp. It is set between the movies and next generation, because I love those ship designs. The goal is to acheive a toon look that is consistent with what cartoons were like then (as opposed to now) so Ulysses31, G.I Joe, Transformers, Batman Animated series etc etc. The main ship is the Cassiopeia, which is a Constellation Class Starship. I am starting with that ship, but hope to get a free more ship sized asset together before moving to internal sets.

This is about 60% done, but in a state I think is ready to share.

srspicer

Looks nice so far......

Rekkert

A very cool concept, and I quite like what you have so far.

mavek

Thanks for the compliments guys.

Two updates, mirror, mirror, mirrored all the nacelles, added a lot of greebles and some reverse view. I think the constellations is one of the most greebly trek/federation ships

srspicer

You are correct. The Soyuz class also has a fair amount of greeblies.

mavek

I decided to take a break from greebles and do a quasi-speed model. The Type5 shuttle craft, slightly updated.

I have been wanting to do this model for years. It is actually a great one to start with to practise modelling skillz!

Tralfaz

Nicely done sir and a very unique approach.

mavek

OK, I knuckled down and finsihed off the constellation class. I have been working on a few side ideas, mainly to try and find a way to unify the style, to make it look more cartoon like. I will post the others later. Here though is the finished Cassiopeia:

mavek

Here is a youtube video of the model doing a full rotation:

Rekkert

Love the updates you did to the shuttle, that larger front window makes a big difference.

As for the Constellation model, great work overall; though I'm not a big fan of the red front end of the nacelles, I much prefer them to be 'off' just like the blue bits, as was the original intention and used on the TOS movies; but that's just personal preference.

Also, I don't know if you're aware, but the shuttlebays are numbered counterclockwise on the original model, with 1 written on the aft-most starboard bay, thus the front facing bay is actually number 4. Still, I see you added more bay doors so the numbering can easily have changed between ship variants.

mavek

@Rekkert Thanks for the observations.

As to the numbers, well I use Raul Mamoru model as reference, which is where that number convention comes from. I however prefer it, I think 1 should be at the front and yes in universe, this is the Cassiopeia, not the Stargazer, so they could be different.

The red bussards! Yeah! I am still on the fence with them. I am not trying to lean into canon I am trying to lean into what I think they might have done in a 80s, early 90s cartoon. The ship a little quiet through the middle, and the TOS connie and the Ambassador class all have red lit bussards, so, not having them red in that context is actually odd, if they had their time over retroactively knowing where they were going the red might actually have been retained. Any way, the goal is is have a bit of fun with the look, there are loads of people who put together screen accurate models, this is not that, there a few bits that are wound up or wound down to take advantage of the cartoon style. But i reserve the right to completely change my mind on that one if it starts to bug me or i get a lot of push back elsewhere.

Rekkert

Yeah after posting the previous comment it stuck on my head and looking at it from an 80's cartoon perspective, the colors do help in making the shapes easier to distinguish. I've been watching a lot of early Gundam lately and I can appreciate the splashes of color on the animation.

hal

Looking really good and some great modelling.

I would say though that for a carton, I think you have actually added too much detail to the ship. Back in the 80's and 90's, most vehicles in cartoons were kept to basic designs to make it easier to draw and animate (this is still true even today in animation and comic books).

I think the sparseness of the first render in this thread is spot on.

mavek

@hal

I was halfway through modelling all the grebbles and I said the same thing. I wanted them all in to see, but i think you are right, there is some detail that can be lost. One can be quite lazy in modelling, and then blame it on trying to "achieve a minimalist style" . The reality is that reduced detail means i can bang out more assets per time, which is a huge enabler for me.

However, I still loved the attention to detail in the likes of Akira. And the detail might be needed if one was to go up close to the ship, I plan to have quiet a few shots of shuttlecrafts and similar flying out of shuttle bays, so then those shots could be quiet tight in.

hal

100% agree. The amount of detail modelling you have done is amazing and its trying to strike that balance between stylised and realistic is a task in itself.

markmassey

Awesome work... although I totally want to see this rendered in the same style as the batman animated series form the 90's.....

mavek

I spent some time on working on the interior, I really want to get stuck into doing the bridge, but felt it better to experiment in the corridor, here is a fairly cool place to play with shapes and material. This, in blender, is modelled to actual size.

Rekkert

Love the style and colors!

The lines are a bit weird IMO though, I assume you're using the freestyle tool to draw the edges? If so, I'd suggest you enable some of the more advanced options over at the 'View Layer Properties' tab, as it'll enable you to have "sketch like" edges, better contour detection, and the ability to change thickness depending on how close objects are to the camera, plus a ton more stuff. Perhaps playing around with those features will attain a more 80's cartoon look, as currently it looks more web-toony to me.

mavek

@Rekkert thank you

Yes this is freestyle, I have been experimenting with it. Every line you see is a marked line. I have had mixed results with contours and sillouettes, blender can get confused with ngons, and random lines can show that you don't want. That might have to do with my poor modelling technique.

Similarly line viability by distance, it, I think, is an all or nothing thing. I would like to have the outline of the door in the background preserved, but the edge detail of the door to disappear. I don't, as yet, know how this is possible, with out separating elements out to different collections. The freestyle mark, is either there or not, it would be nice if you could make them indexable. I haven't given up yet, so will try again.

I have yet to really experiment with sketch like lines, I will definitely look at that.

Freestyle is an interesting feature in blender, but I think it is going to be replaced by a new line art mode, but it is not available in any build release yet. I have also looked at th ae malt rendering engine that is albe to infer edges better, but I find it makes my computer very slow, enough to get in the way of my productivity.

Any way, as a base, this model is great to experiment with all those things. I may release it so other people can see and play, provided there is interest.

Starship

How I missed this thread?!
Good work all around old bean!

ChiefBrex

Looking great. Kinda reminds me of Bob's Burgers in terms of animation style. If Lower Decks had this quality of animation, I'd be more open to it.

publiusr

You said it.

mavek

So this is Chris Khun's model of the EnterpriseC/Ambassador class. I wanted to see how easy or hard it is to convert a mesh over to the toon style. Chris works in blender too, so that meant that things like the edge loops were still preserved, which makes it very easy to select edges you wish to mark. That all been said I still have to do some significant rework, the whole saucer is redone and never all the textures had to be reselected and reassigned, but I think it turned out great.



If you are interested here is the same model in the same position, but rendered in cycles, which took over 8 hours to render, the toon image comes in in under 4 minutes, with freestyle edges to boot:

mavek

Sadly ScifiMeshes doesn't do embeds, this link will bring you to a nice image slider that overlays the two images.

mavek

Here is a fun digression. I love a good blueprint and have done a 2d version of the Cassiopeia in inkscape, like this for example:



But it is so unforgiving, every line has to be drawn and redrawn for every view, I always wanted to have a 3d model version to pull views off, from any angle. A little tweak of the toon work results in this:



Need to do a rotation for the model, and then this is going in the background of a bridge display

scifieric

This is all very, very cool.

Rekkert

I share your pain of doing schematics "the old way" on Inkscape, but the 3D model works great for this with the setup you got going!

mavek

Here is the model going through its rotations:

Rekkert

The style and effect works great, but for an okudagram screen I think it'd be better in an orthographic camera setting rather than perspective.

mavek

@Rekkert I tried an orthographic camera initially, but some of the silhouette lines around the nacelle just disappeared. I redid it with perspective and it looked better. It might be a glitch with freestyle and orthographic views.

I may try again with a fake ortho effect. Move the perspective camera back super far and blow up the zoom.

Ultimately I think you only really notice it when you are bang on square view. But good eye, I should know better than trying to sneak that one by 😉

mavek

Here is a re-texture of a MAX mesh imported into blender of Vanguard station by David Metlesits.

I figure that the TOS built infrastructure would still be in use in the era post TOS movies, even if there was some re decalling.