I'd probably go for slightly shorter still in fact... perhaps moving them in towards the centre spine of the ship might help though instead? I think part of the cause of them looking "shaky" is because they look so loose and out in the open, with little structural support around them.
Nice work overall, you can definitely tell the lineage back to the Venators on this.
I think for now I'm going to leave the main engines as is. I don't want to move them inward too much further because then there's this great expanse of hull just sticking out without much going on. But we'll see. Meanwhile I added a couple dugouts on the top for some more exposed machinery to sit in and completely overhauled the paneling. And started work on the Eviscerator, a Tormentor derivative with three engines and less spine.
Some more work on the Eviscerator. Just paneling and gun placement and started work on the hangar bays in the trench. I'm thinking of reworking the hull of the Tormentor, making it a bit narrower.
Did some more work on the Tormentor. The sensor things are just floating till I build the structure to hold them in place. Decided against making the hull more narrow, but it gave me an idea for smaller class of ship, maybe a frigate or something along those lines. Work continues...
Nice - for some reason the larger engine pods also seem to fit better; maybe its the anlge of the shot? Or have you made the "tail" chunkier?
Great model in any case. I'd suggest keeping only a very minimal structure keeping the sensor globes in place, it looks more interesting having them almost "free floating" from the main hull.
Yeah I've always liked this particular angle, when I first started sketching out the ship this was the angle I started at so I always seem to go back to it. The tail is the same, and it prefers to be called "portly" rather than chunky And now the sensor globes aren't just floating there. I might add another support coming down to meet up with those coming out of the side.
I have, for the umpteenth time, completely started over from scratch with this! Well almost completely, I imported my old globes (to some these are sensors, to others they are deflectors) and sensor parts from the bridge structure. But everything else is new. I'm trying to take my time and build greebles rather than just build a box and use a greeble plug-in on it. So far I have kept this plug-in free... I've changed the hull quite a bit, the engines hanging off the bottom are gone but otherwise the basic shapes are still there, albeit refined a bit, it's not quite so flat and wide as the previous version. Here's some pics and there's more at the website
Heh, what I love with the old sensors vs. shields debate is the way that even the DK cross sections guys sat on the fence on this issue with their Complete Locations book where they have a cutaway of the Executor's conning tower. There they state it as being a sensor and shield generator/array thingy which made me laugh. Even they didn't want to offend any fans on this subject (though I believe they do refer to the spheres as sensors when taking on the ISD cross section for the original trilogy book). I have to admit I'm a believer in them being shields, but not for the whole ship, just enhanced shielding for the conning tower, which kinda makes sense seeing how it is such an exposed target. But I totally get that they could be sensors too, as the design does look like the old radar globes. The age old debate continues.
Great work on this model by the way, liking the melding of the two eras destroyers.
So recently (yesterday), I rendered these two pics of my Tormentor SD and at long last I am happy with my panel lines. You probably don't realize what a huge thing that is for me. I have been staring at Fractalsponge's pics for years now an marveled at his awesome system of paneling his models, big or small they all come out looking freaking awesome and I have foamed at the mouth with jealousy. I know he uses a large pattern and somehow gets that glued to the surface and then presto it looks freaking awesome and every couple of months I'll post in his thread "that's stunning" or "that's awesome" and I would post more but my vocabulary suffers from not completing college so I am bereft of terms to express my admiration for his work and my desire to learn how he maintains sanity while doing it. Anyway, after looking at his stuff I'll get inspired to go back to any of the dozen or so star destroyer type models I have saved on my hard drive in various stages of frustration. I've tried the pattern thing several hundred times and all I get is thousands and thousands of extra vertices and a computer gasping for more memory like it was air to breathe, I think I even killed a motherboard trying that method. Anyway, I can't do it like Fractalsponge, the man's a genius and I can't hold a candle to him for modeling. So I spent yesterday cutting and pruning and trimming and pissing off my wife and finally rendered these two pics, and I was pleased with the look.
In my happiness, I went down to the strip (I live in Vegas) and tried to hold a press conference in front of the Mirage. I figured I would pay a homeless man $10 to hold a microphone up in front of me and set up my video camera on a tripod in hopes that maybe a news van would pass by and they would think some interesting stuff was about to go down and jump on the opportunity. Well, I ended up paying the homeless man a bit more than $10, here's a little life lesson, not all people that look homeless are homeless, some of them are just criminals and have gangs of friends that will rob you on a side street near the strip. Everything turned out for the best though, my wallet was old and needed replacing anyway as was my video camera. So the press conference thing didn't work out, but, now I've got an interesting story to tell my co-workers on monday and I'm still pleased with my panel lines.
The panneling turnned out really good Tony! Well done. :thumb:
IAâm glad you found a good side for that trip and everything turned out for the best too.
Thanks Starship, I was of course kidding about the press conference/mugging etc., I should probably try and avoid attempts at humor and stick to talking about the model lol. I did some more refining on the panels and I'm taking another pass at the gun belt details. I decided I might like some closeup views looking out from the gun belt at some passing fighters or such and for that I'm going to need a whole lot more greebling...
Thanks dude! I had the day off today and was hoping to get a lot of work done on it but as fate would have it my external hard drive died (where I keep all my models etc.). So I spent the day recovering data in small bits and pieces at a time, but fortunately I didn't lose anything other than time. So here's about a half hours instead of a whole day. I lowered the panels so they don't appear so stark, kinda dominated everything else. I still have to work on the greebles to give this a better sense of scale, which is what I wanted to do today lol...
Cracking work on the greebles in the trench, and the panel details, coming on nicely this model. Gotta be careful on that strip it is a jungle out there.
...my external hard drive died (where I keep all my models etc.). So I spent the day recovering data in small bits and pieces at a time, but fortunately I didn't lose anything other than time...
Hey, youAâre a lucky man Tony!
DonAât forget the backups this time.
About the ship, good work. All appears to be in the right place for the upcoming Lord VaderAâs visit.
Thanks for the comments! Things are moving right along... I'm starting to instance some of the objects so right now it looks a little cut and pasty, and some parts are just kinda hanging in midair lol... but I'm going to move some things around and add and subtract other parts to keep it from being too repetitive...
The damn trench again, I know.... I was just about finished with it and as I was looking at I realized two things, first that I was slapping stuff on just to take up space so I could call it finished and not really putting forth my best effort and second, the rounded guns and platforms really were giving it a Star Blazers look that just doesn't fit with Star Wars stuff. So, I deleted all of that and have started again but here's a couple of pics showing the new trench guns, kinda reminiscent of the tower guns on the Death Star, and the heavy turbolasers more in keeping with the Avenger style guns. So with those changes this ship will appear as it would have after refits and upgrades around the ESB/ROTJ era. And here's a couple of pics....
Taking a little break from the Tormentor and started putting this Imperial Light Cruiser together. Mostly just using parts from the Tormentor which really speeds things along, for me anyway lol....
Nice, obviously you've still got work to do on that conning tower, but this is looking really interesting. Are you basing it on the light Republic cruiser you see in the Clone Wars cartoon series? Can't remember what class that is supposed to be. Ahh, just looked it up, the Arquitens-class light cruiser?
That was the inspiration! Although, I had seen it as a small set of physical models here.... http://nicholassagan.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/bench-update-12256-republic-light-cruisers/ I get the impression that the Clone Wars version isn't much bigger than the consular ship but, I haven't seen the show so its hard to judge based on the pics I've seen. This version is obviously much smaller than an ISD but still a formidable little ship...
Those are pretty cool, particularly like the Republic and Imperial versions side by side. There seem to be a lot of spacecraft designs coming out that make use of that triple booster engine configuration that the Consular class uses. I'm working on one myself, a courier class ship inspired by the Consular class Republic Cruiser, but about the size equivalent of a Lambda or Sentinel class shuttle for use by the Rebel Alliance. Well they can't be hijacking a Lambda for all their light transport needs, and the YT-1300 is a bit over used for this sort of thing. Here's a 2d sketch of the thing, once I find a bit of spare time in my schedule I'll take a look at developing it into 3d.
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Nice work overall, you can definitely tell the lineage back to the Venators on this.
Great model in any case. I'd suggest keeping only a very minimal structure keeping the sensor globes in place, it looks more interesting having them almost "free floating" from the main hull.
I call them sensors because thats what the model makers called them when interveiwed back in the late 70s. http://www.theforce.net/swtc/towers.html#cinefex
But I can totaly see why people would call them shield generators. (due to ill-timed dialog)
Great work on this model by the way, liking the melding of the two eras destroyers.
In my happiness, I went down to the strip (I live in Vegas) and tried to hold a press conference in front of the Mirage. I figured I would pay a homeless man $10 to hold a microphone up in front of me and set up my video camera on a tripod in hopes that maybe a news van would pass by and they would think some interesting stuff was about to go down and jump on the opportunity. Well, I ended up paying the homeless man a bit more than $10, here's a little life lesson, not all people that look homeless are homeless, some of them are just criminals and have gangs of friends that will rob you on a side street near the strip. Everything turned out for the best though, my wallet was old and needed replacing anyway as was my video camera. So the press conference thing didn't work out, but, now I've got an interesting story to tell my co-workers on monday and I'm still pleased with my panel lines.
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IAâm glad you found a good side for that trip and everything turned out for the best too.
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Hey, youAâre a lucky man Tony!
DonAât forget the backups this time.
About the ship, good work. All appears to be in the right place for the upcoming Lord VaderAâs visit.
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Your ships does to look fine, donAât worry!
But.. wish I had that level of skill/patience to do that...
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http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Arquitens-class_light_cruiser
Was that your inspiration for this class, perhaps an Imperial equivalent? Either way looks like you're off to a cracking start.