Oh yeah yeah, I can see that... not just the engines itself but also the shape of the field itself is causing the distortions. Longer engines so things are more spread out, triangular hull makes a longer skinnier bubble that's more like a needle than a ball... seals the hole it makes as it goes along. Maybe it doesn't fully solve the problem yet but it's a huge improvement.
I can imagine that also being a big kick in the pants for Starfleet and other ship designers, they might have been feeling that they were about to hit a wall of power/speed that you can pull out of a ship (hence doing things like turning the crystals 45 degrees), and this gave them new goalposts and challenges and sparked whole new fields of innovation.
Yeah, "Force of Nature" was one of the episodes that should have had longer lasting ramifications than it did. At the end of the episode, Picard said that Starfleet ships were limited to warp 5, except for in extreme emergencies, until a safer way to travel at warp was discovered. The warp speed limit was mentioned in a few follow up episodes, which basically consisted of an Admiral telling Picard that the Enterprise had permission to exceed warp 5 for the mission of the episode. But, then it was very quickly dropped because of what it did to the writers. It basically tied their hands.
And that's the problem with episodic television. When you introduce a continuing story, you have to stick with it. With Worf's discommendation from the Klingon Empire, which was their first continuing story, they were able to stick with it. This is because it really didn't affect much in other episodes, other than making it uncomfortable for Worf to be around other Klingons. However, "Force of Nature" messed with a basic technology that all of Star Trek depended upon. They couldn't let that continue because it would have made for a tiring narrative. Every hero ship would have to be given near constant permission to exceed the warp speed limit, which is unrealistic. It was easier to just make the episode's continuing story quietly go away. So, they dropped it a few episodes later.
The bigger issue with the explanation of Voyager being able to exceed the warp speed limit due to its design is the timing. "Force of Nature" was the ninth episode of TNG's seventh season, it took place in 2370. Voyager was launched in 2371. In fact, the timing was, they wrapped up TNG, filmed Generations right afterward, and then started rebuilding and redressing the sets for Voyager. In Star Trek stardates, "Force of Nature" takes place from stardate 47310.2 to 47314.5. "Caretaker" is from stardate 48315.6 to 48317. That's literally just a year later. There's no way they found a fix, then designed and launched a ship in 1 year that could be an answer to that problem. Besides, that's either a fan theory or a BTS BS reason they came up with to explain it that was never actually said in an episode. And, on the DS9 side, they totally ignored "Force of Nature." DS9 was in its second season when that episode aired, but there really wasn't much interaction between the crews of the shows.
In reality, Voyager's design was based on Rick Sternbach being given the assignment to make a ship that was state of the art but was much smaller than the Enterprise-D. And, he had to make part of the ship move. After a few other ideas, they settled on the nacelles moving. The real reason is because it looks cool.
I just designed my ship along the same lines because I like the longer and sleeker saucers of the post-TNG era, and I like long slender nacelles too. And, of course, it's fun to mix in some harder edges with the curves.
The less believable (for a drama) thing could have been that the new warp tech had been in development for a while and wasn't really getting looked about because the current tech was good enough, but it wound up checking enough boxes for what Starfleet needed that they went ahead with it. Sort of like the first digital cameras or EVs, they did enough but didn't have all the features quite yet, so there wasn't a big push to replace the old pipeline. I read Loonshots a couple months ago and apparently a lot of cutting edge technology (like Radar) was pushed to the side because no one could imagine the value of it. I could see this variable warp technology being in the background for ages but not getting any attention because warp worked good enough.
So Voyager could be like the EV1 or the camera they shot Attack Of The Clones with, yeah it works and gets the job done but there's a few tradeoffs. The real innovations will come down the line, maybe the Titan is the one that's most comparable to the old tech in terms of performance (a match for the D, perfect for Captain Riker), and the Inquiry class (as much as I hate it) is the first one to do it better with more features which is why they made a thousand of those things.
True, it could have been being worked on. After all, electric vehicles were a possibility when that episode was made and the episode was a thinly veiled criticism of the damaging nature of gas powered vehicles on our own planet. But, we know how long it took to actually start getting EVs on a consumer level after that episode aired. If someone had actually convinced people back in the 90s that EVs were better for the environment, they could have rolled out much sooner.
Digital cameras too, which was my other comp (this is making me want to reviist Frame By Frame and Who Killed The Electric Car). I think the key difference is that Starfleet made it a mandate to switch over rather than it being a consumer-driven switch. Plus a bunch of Starfleeters are gearheads and speedfreaks who would HATE the idea of being stuck at Warp 5, so I'm sure that was a big help in kickstarting solutions. It's the biggest brain trust in the galaxy, and they probably have an incredible information sharing system in place. Remember how quickly the Voyager crew was able to design and build the Delta Flyer, and that's just one crew. Yeah, TV drama needs means it's quick, but imagine TEN THOUSAND people at work on a project like that with an incredibly coordinated information sharing network and suddenly reinventing the wheel that quickly seems... doable.
...in "Force of Nature" it was proven that high warp speeds were damaging to subspace. So, ships had to be designed to allow high warp speeds without causing damage. It was never stated on screen, but that was the reason for Voyager's warp engines raising when it went to warp. Ships that were designed later didn't require this, as obviously a new type of warp system was created for those ships. AKA, "we wrote ourselves into a corner with our attempt at an episode with an environmental message, so we'll just write ourselves back out of it."
I always wondered about that. Thanks Chris. This point has bugged me for years.
Digital cameras too, which was my other comp (this is making me want to reviist Frame By Frame and Who Killed The Electric Car). I think the key difference is that Starfleet made it a mandate to switch over rather than it being a consumer-driven switch. Plus a bunch of Starfleeters are gearheads and speedfreaks who would HATE the idea of being stuck at Warp 5, so I'm sure that was a big help in kickstarting solutions. It's the biggest brain trust in the galaxy, and they probably have an incredible information sharing system in place. Remember how quickly the Voyager crew was able to design and build the Delta Flyer, and that's just one crew. Yeah, TV drama needs means it's quick, but imagine TEN THOUSAND people at work on a project like that with an incredibly coordinated information sharing network and suddenly reinventing the wheel that quickly seems... doable.
It was actually the Federation Council who ruled that warp travel be limited until a safer way of traveling at warp could be implemented. So, it had wider range than just Starfleet, all lawful Federation citizens would have had to obey the restrictions. That would have given them more brains working on it than just Starfleet too.
But, as you said, the timelines of TV. I always loved watching CSI and how they got DNA comparison results back in minutes.
I haven't decided if this is worth continuing to develop or not. It was more of a proof of concept which is, quite frankly, not that good. The idea of doing a ship that's seamless is appealing, but doing it all one piece adds a bunch of issues. The biggest issues become apparent once I start adding grid lines. Going with the shape of the edges that make up the polygons, I wind up with some undesirable shapes with the lines. They're wavy instead of straight. This wouldn't be an issue if I'd just built the ship normally.
I think at this point it's better to just scrap this idea and either go back to the Constellation class or move on to something else.
The Rycon is a good example of how I can have the parts be separate, but I can use bevels to mostly achieve the seamless look without winding up with weird wavy grid lines.
I love how the surface of that last one looks. I'm still struggling with the textures on the Titan. I really hate them. I'm using my frustration as an opportunity to try and learn proper PBR rendering. I've waited too long.
I love how the surface of that last one looks. I'm still struggling with the textures on the Titan. I really hate them. I'm using my frustration as an opportunity to try and learn proper PBR rendering. I've waited too long.
I sincerely hope it's gotten better than it was in Lightwave 2018, when that type of rendering was introduced. I'd imagine it has, though. I remember when Blender introduced the Cylcles render engine, which is what I'm using now. It was pretty rough back then, but it's gotten a lot better in the years since it was introduced.
What's the keyboard shortcut to merge faces in Lightwave? I can't remember it to save my life.
I was messing around with this model in Lightwave:
Speficially, I was looking at exporting it to .fbx so that I can import it into Blender. Well, that was... interesting. I forgot that the .fbx export or import into Blender doesn't like ngons. I suspect that's more of a problem with the export than the import, since Blender handles ngons just fine. I was able to get the model to export and import cleanly, if I triangulated the ngons:
I'm pretty sure this is what I had to do to convert my Enterprise model. On both models, I stenciled the name and registry onto the hull. While not ideal, this isn't a problem on the Enterprise, I want it to still say USS Enterprise NCC-1701. However, I don't want the other model to say USS Equinox NCC-1832. That model was one I built for a fan film that fizzled and I want to change the name and registry, and maybe not stencil them onto the hull this time. This is doable in Blender for sure, but the I have all of those triangles to merge. Ugh. If I do it before I export to .fbx, those will be quads and it won't be a problem. But, I can't remember how to merge faces in Lightwave.
Of course, I was rebuilding this ship in Blender anyway, but this is as far as I've made it:
I could just finish that model, but part of me just wants to do the import. Of course, I could just use some of the greebles from the Lightwave model to finish the Blender one and call it a day, but I still want to remember how to merge faces in Lightwave.
By the way, if you're one of those people who doesn't build things in scale, you might want to consider it. I was building the Blender model using orthos I rendered of the Lightwave model in a 1:1 scale. Both models are the same size and I could easily transplant parts from one model to the other:
Though, I did notice one interesting thing. Apparently I used some Constellation class greebles on the Lightwave model. That gives me an idea of another place where I can pilfer parts:
Sure, it's fun to build things. But, sometimes you just want to finish a model, so you pilfer parts from another model to finish it.
What's the keyboard shortcut to merge faces in Lightwave? I can't remember it to save my life.
If you mean merging two polygons to become one polygon the key sequence is CTRL Z with both polygons highlighted. If I remember correctly, if the polygons are two different colors the resulting polygon will take on the color of the last polygon selected.
There is also something very useful I more recently learned about and that was the "Bridge function" followed by something called "Band Glue." The bridge function does what it sounds like, it creates a bridge (as best it can) between two polygons that are in proximity to each other (facing each other). The "Band glue" function makes it possible to make the entire bridge merge into one polygon on each side that were formerly 3 separate polygons on the side. The beauty of it is that it automatically goes around the entire structure, making each side one polygon, even removing the points. If you're not sure what I'm saying, I can provide images.
Ctrl Z is undo. I actually just found it in the Detail tab, Polygons sub menu (ah, the Lightwave interface ) and it's Shift + Z. Thanks a lot for the help. In Blender, I just select the polygons and hit F.
I found those other tools you were talking about, in the "Construct" tab. I'll take a look at them. Man, it's been a while since I've done anything in Lightwave.
Looking at it more, I just don't know if it's worth actually saving this old Equinox mesh or not. I mean, some parts can probably be used, but the parts I've already rebuilt in Blender are definitely better off for it. Just looking at how I did the windows on that mesh:
Versus how I did them on the Enterprise:
The Equinox's windows go straight in and have hard edges, while I did some edge rounding on the Enterprise's windows. That's why I was OK importing the Enterprise into Blender, I did a lot of things how I do them now, not how I did them a decade ago. Though, some things like the navigational deflector will probably be good to go. Possibly the impulse engines and some of the warp engine details too.
Here are the pictures for Bridging and band glue. Step 1 Select the two polygons facing each other that you want to join. In the picture there is a gap between the two in question.
Step 2 Activate the "Bridge" Command under the Construct tab toward the bottom.
Step 3 Select one side of the bridged structure you want to clean up. It has to be the same 3 polygon pattern on all four sides.
Step 4 Select "Band Glue" under Construct -> Reduce -> More
Instantly it is all cleaned up with no points or anything. This is really helpful when you are wanting to join pipes and clean it up. There could be 36 sides that you would rather not be made up of 108 polygons.
OK, I'm copying bits from the Lightwave mesh to the Blender one. While this is way less time consuming than rebuilding stuff, I still have some work to do, such as getting rid of all of those unnecessary triangles I created for export. Of course, I have to be sure to leave the ones that I need there to fix things like nonplanar faces.
The ship now has impulse engines, some nacelle details and a navigational deflector.
Figuring out how to do the fraggin' gradient on the impulse engine was more fun than should be legal. But, I got it:
I had achieved this look using a gradient in Lightwave, so I needed to figure out how to do it in Blender.
of those flow chart things. Makes me want a 65" 8k monitor so I don't have to scroll all over to see what does what on a simple hull material T_T Maybe they are better in blender than max. Ones in max do not fully disclose all settings either if memory serves. Was so much easier with the old editor to unpack and include bits in a screen grab to share material settings. Still think they should allow you to just export a material as a FILE. but nope stuck with silly libs and other wonk.
interesting on the bridge thing. Max has it but you just select faces and itll bridge whatever loops you set before clicking it. Just gotta make sure your bridge faces match or itll do strange things lol I use it a lot doing silly tricks to model in details without annoying detaching groups of faces etc. That and dodging crash related bugs in max. Interesting about the clean up thing, a bit lost how it would create mess but I know blender does somethings very differently. Things like lacking smoothing groups so you cannot dictate by face how stuff smooths just loops? of smoothing?? I forget the term that was explained to me how it works.
of those flow chart things. Makes me want a 65" 8k monitor so I don't have to scroll all over to see what does what on a simple hull material T_T Maybe they are better in blender than max. Ones in max do not fully disclose all settings either if memory serves. Was so much easier with the old editor to unpack and include bits in a screen grab to share material settings. Still think they should allow you to just export a material as a FILE. but nope stuck with silly libs and other wonk.
Yeah, the nodes are a pain. They've been one of my biggest learning curves coming from Lightwave to Blender. In Lightwave, I literally just had to add a texture layer to my material with a simple gradient with alpha transparency on top of the main color layer:
Boom, done. No messing with nodes. You can use nodes in Lightwave, but they aren't necessary. Blender lives and dies by its nodes. To do anything beyond the most basic materials, you have to use nodes. After a while, you can wind up with a huge mess of stuff. Here's a pretty crazy one, just to do the surface of this planet:
(Note: I'm not that smart, I followed a YouTube tutorial to do this)
It's a huge mess, just to make the surface. And that's not even including the clouds or atmosphere. But, all of this is necessary just to make a procedurally generated material that looks like the surface of a planet. Circling back around to the impulse engine glowy thing. Just to have a gradient overlay like I did in Lightwave would required even more nodes. Or, I just do the gradient with a color ramp to make it look the same without making an overlay. Figuring out which nodes to use to get me there and messing around with different things and settings took a long time. Many of the nodes don't tell you what they do, you either have to figure it out using trial and error or turn to a web search and hope you can find a relevant tutorial. I'm using Blender 4.2, which is the newest long term support release, which was released recently. Unfortunately, you can find tutorials that go back years to versions 2.X, when nodes were introduced. With tutorials that old, you run the risk of things being different or not even available anymore. And it's not just nodes. I've looked at tutorials that reference things like render settings that aren't in the newer versions of Blender, but they were in versions past.
I'll say this for Lightwave. When they add a tool, it almost never goes away. That's why the interface is so huge, you have tools upon tools to choose from. I didn't even know about that bridge thing until @Brandenberg mentioned it. It's just one of many tools in that tab in the LW interface.
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I can imagine that also being a big kick in the pants for Starfleet and other ship designers, they might have been feeling that they were about to hit a wall of power/speed that you can pull out of a ship (hence doing things like turning the crystals 45 degrees), and this gave them new goalposts and challenges and sparked whole new fields of innovation.
And that's the problem with episodic television. When you introduce a continuing story, you have to stick with it. With Worf's discommendation from the Klingon Empire, which was their first continuing story, they were able to stick with it. This is because it really didn't affect much in other episodes, other than making it uncomfortable for Worf to be around other Klingons. However, "Force of Nature" messed with a basic technology that all of Star Trek depended upon. They couldn't let that continue because it would have made for a tiring narrative. Every hero ship would have to be given near constant permission to exceed the warp speed limit, which is unrealistic. It was easier to just make the episode's continuing story quietly go away. So, they dropped it a few episodes later.
The bigger issue with the explanation of Voyager being able to exceed the warp speed limit due to its design is the timing. "Force of Nature" was the ninth episode of TNG's seventh season, it took place in 2370. Voyager was launched in 2371. In fact, the timing was, they wrapped up TNG, filmed Generations right afterward, and then started rebuilding and redressing the sets for Voyager. In Star Trek stardates, "Force of Nature" takes place from stardate 47310.2 to 47314.5. "Caretaker" is from stardate 48315.6 to 48317. That's literally just a year later. There's no way they found a fix, then designed and launched a ship in 1 year that could be an answer to that problem. Besides, that's either a fan theory or a BTS BS reason they came up with to explain it that was never actually said in an episode. And, on the DS9 side, they totally ignored "Force of Nature." DS9 was in its second season when that episode aired, but there really wasn't much interaction between the crews of the shows.
In reality, Voyager's design was based on Rick Sternbach being given the assignment to make a ship that was state of the art but was much smaller than the Enterprise-D. And, he had to make part of the ship move. After a few other ideas, they settled on the nacelles moving. The real reason is because it looks cool.
I just designed my ship along the same lines because I like the longer and sleeker saucers of the post-TNG era, and I like long slender nacelles too. And, of course, it's fun to mix in some harder edges with the curves.
The less believable (for a drama) thing could have been that the new warp tech had been in development for a while and wasn't really getting looked about because the current tech was good enough, but it wound up checking enough boxes for what Starfleet needed that they went ahead with it. Sort of like the first digital cameras or EVs, they did enough but didn't have all the features quite yet, so there wasn't a big push to replace the old pipeline. I read Loonshots a couple months ago and apparently a lot of cutting edge technology (like Radar) was pushed to the side because no one could imagine the value of it. I could see this variable warp technology being in the background for ages but not getting any attention because warp worked good enough.
So Voyager could be like the EV1 or the camera they shot Attack Of The Clones with, yeah it works and gets the job done but there's a few tradeoffs. The real innovations will come down the line, maybe the Titan is the one that's most comparable to the old tech in terms of performance (a match for the D, perfect for Captain Riker), and the Inquiry class (as much as I hate it) is the first one to do it better with more features which is why they made a thousand of those things.
It was actually the Federation Council who ruled that warp travel be limited until a safer way of traveling at warp could be implemented. So, it had wider range than just Starfleet, all lawful Federation citizens would have had to obey the restrictions. That would have given them more brains working on it than just Starfleet too.
But, as you said, the timelines of TV. I always loved watching CSI and how they got DNA comparison results back in minutes.
I think at this point it's better to just scrap this idea and either go back to the Constellation class or move on to something else.
The Rycon is a good example of how I can have the parts be separate, but I can use bevels to mostly achieve the seamless look without winding up with weird wavy grid lines.
I sincerely hope it's gotten better than it was in Lightwave 2018, when that type of rendering was introduced. I'd imagine it has, though. I remember when Blender introduced the Cylcles render engine, which is what I'm using now. It was pretty rough back then, but it's gotten a lot better in the years since it was introduced.
What's the keyboard shortcut to merge faces in Lightwave? I can't remember it to save my life.
I was messing around with this model in Lightwave:
Speficially, I was looking at exporting it to .fbx so that I can import it into Blender. Well, that was... interesting. I forgot that the .fbx export or import into Blender doesn't like ngons. I suspect that's more of a problem with the export than the import, since Blender handles ngons just fine. I was able to get the model to export and import cleanly, if I triangulated the ngons:
I'm pretty sure this is what I had to do to convert my Enterprise model. On both models, I stenciled the name and registry onto the hull. While not ideal, this isn't a problem on the Enterprise, I want it to still say USS Enterprise NCC-1701. However, I don't want the other model to say USS Equinox NCC-1832. That model was one I built for a fan film that fizzled and I want to change the name and registry, and maybe not stencil them onto the hull this time. This is doable in Blender for sure, but the I have all of those triangles to merge. Ugh. If I do it before I export to .fbx, those will be quads and it won't be a problem. But, I can't remember how to merge faces in Lightwave.
Of course, I was rebuilding this ship in Blender anyway, but this is as far as I've made it:
I could just finish that model, but part of me just wants to do the import. Of course, I could just use some of the greebles from the Lightwave model to finish the Blender one and call it a day, but I still want to remember how to merge faces in Lightwave.
Though, I did notice one interesting thing. Apparently I used some Constellation class greebles on the Lightwave model. That gives me an idea of another place where I can pilfer parts:
Sure, it's fun to build things. But, sometimes you just want to finish a model, so you pilfer parts from another model to finish it.
There is also something very useful I more recently learned about and that was the "Bridge function" followed by something called "Band Glue." The bridge function does what it sounds like, it creates a bridge (as best it can) between two polygons that are in proximity to each other (facing each other). The "Band glue" function makes it possible to make the entire bridge merge into one polygon on each side that were formerly 3 separate polygons on the side. The beauty of it is that it automatically goes around the entire structure, making each side one polygon, even removing the points. If you're not sure what I'm saying, I can provide images.
I found those other tools you were talking about, in the "Construct" tab. I'll take a look at them. Man, it's been a while since I've done anything in Lightwave.
Versus how I did them on the Enterprise:
The Equinox's windows go straight in and have hard edges, while I did some edge rounding on the Enterprise's windows. That's why I was OK importing the Enterprise into Blender, I did a lot of things how I do them now, not how I did them a decade ago. Though, some things like the navigational deflector will probably be good to go. Possibly the impulse engines and some of the warp engine details too.
Step 2 Activate the "Bridge" Command under the Construct tab toward the bottom.
Step 3 Select one side of the bridged structure you want to clean up. It has to be the same 3 polygon pattern on all four sides.
Step 4 Select "Band Glue" under Construct -> Reduce -> More
Instantly it is all cleaned up with no points or anything. This is really helpful when you are wanting to join pipes and clean it up. There could be 36 sides that you would rather not be made up of 108 polygons.
The ship now has impulse engines, some nacelle details and a navigational deflector.
Figuring out how to do the fraggin' gradient on the impulse engine was more fun than should be legal.
I had achieved this look using a gradient in Lightwave, so I needed to figure out how to do it in Blender.
interesting on the bridge thing. Max has it but you just select faces and itll bridge whatever loops you set before clicking it. Just gotta make sure your bridge faces match or itll do strange things lol I use it a lot doing silly tricks to model in details without annoying detaching groups of faces etc. That and dodging crash related bugs in max. Interesting about the clean up thing, a bit lost how it would create mess but I know blender does somethings very differently. Things like lacking smoothing groups so you cannot dictate by face how stuff smooths just loops? of smoothing?? I forget the term that was explained to me how it works.
Yeah, the nodes are a pain. They've been one of my biggest learning curves coming from Lightwave to Blender. In Lightwave, I literally just had to add a texture layer to my material with a simple gradient with alpha transparency on top of the main color layer:
Boom, done. No messing with nodes. You can use nodes in Lightwave, but they aren't necessary. Blender lives and dies by its nodes. To do anything beyond the most basic materials, you have to use nodes. After a while, you can wind up with a huge mess of stuff. Here's a pretty crazy one, just to do the surface of this planet:
(Note: I'm not that smart, I followed a YouTube tutorial to do this)
It's a huge mess, just to make the surface. And that's not even including the clouds or atmosphere. But, all of this is necessary just to make a procedurally generated material that looks like the surface of a planet. Circling back around to the impulse engine glowy thing. Just to have a gradient overlay like I did in Lightwave would required even more nodes. Or, I just do the gradient with a color ramp to make it look the same without making an overlay. Figuring out which nodes to use to get me there and messing around with different things and settings took a long time. Many of the nodes don't tell you what they do, you either have to figure it out using trial and error or turn to a web search and hope you can find a relevant tutorial. I'm using Blender 4.2, which is the newest long term support release, which was released recently. Unfortunately, you can find tutorials that go back years to versions 2.X, when nodes were introduced. With tutorials that old, you run the risk of things being different or not even available anymore. And it's not just nodes. I've looked at tutorials that reference things like render settings that aren't in the newer versions of Blender, but they were in versions past.
I'll say this for Lightwave. When they add a tool, it almost never goes away. That's why the interface is so huge, you have tools upon tools to choose from. I didn't even know about that bridge thing until @Brandenberg mentioned it. It's just one of many tools in that tab in the LW interface.