Thank you Night, and it's good to be back. Over the last two nights, I experimented with Photoshop and actually came really close to something I could live with. Unfortunately I got so deep into different approaches that I lost track of exactly how I got there. I was also extremely tired when I did it. No worries, I just have to retrace a bit to get it back.
Evil, here are a couple of renders. The saucer top has Nightfever's map as a test. It looks really good, but I gotta make my own. The Nacelle is a bit further along than that render, but it's all I have right now. The blades are modeled after a pre-production sketch I found while gathering reference material. Can't recall the link, but when I do, I'll post it here.
Your bussard looks pretty good.
The official Art of the film book says that there is no physical glass dome in front of the dome cage. The canon blades are a bit more complicate
Here is a scan from the book:
Great reference Night! The Right pic of the blades is actually the one I came across to model my fans. That shape is a nightmare. With those references, I'll be able to detail the whole mesh better.
Thanks Mikey, it only gets better from here.
Chris, I try not to look at the whole completed unit, but rather one little piece at a time. Look at a nicely detailed engine - the whole unit is impressive and daunting, the individual components are just a lot of bits and pieces pretty easy to manage. Every piece starts out as a box, cylinder, or plane and then a little bit of Max magic;) Pic is from a hot rod modeling tut I did a while back : http://cg.tutsplus.com/tutorials/autodesk-3d-studio-max/creating-a-next-gen-video-game-hot-rod-the-complete-workflow-day-1/
Although no posts in a couple of days, I've been very busy teaching myself the basics of Illustrator. I've gotten to the point of being able to draw the Aztec pattern and taking that image into Max. I haven't posted the render because I also made a composite material with a random tile map test and applied a bump to it. Bump was a bit high and now I've gotta go to work. Will render and post as soon as I've got something a bit cleaner to show.
Had a nasty virus over the weekend that made me think my hard drive had physical damage to it. I could not boot up and got the blue screen of death before shutting down. It almost worked, and I almost bought a new drive had it not been for the fact that I recognized some strange behavior; when I booted my computer up with a USB stick, a program popped up calling itself "System Restore".
The program looked very much like the System Restore that comes with windows, but even that does not pop up all by itself. Sooooo, I figured it was a virus, and I was right.
Checking the internet with a search for System Restore virus got me the info I needed to kill the virus and almost get me back up and running. You can imagine my relief, since my Enterprise work was only stored on the almost dead drive.
The virus did damage my boot record, but I just re-wrote that with the copy stored on the drive - now all is good again.
Since it took me all weekend to fix this issue, I had little time to work on my Aztec pattern. I did want to share what I have so far in Illustrator. Since this is vector based, it is resolution independent and will translate nicely into a very sharp map.
Thanks EG. Out if town again till Friday with no workstation. I did have a chance to work on the Aztec a bit more before I left. Also started to play with unwrapping the mesh:argh: Once I get back I'm gonna detail out the nacelles and get that over with. I have to say that part is my least favorite to model. It's been a real challenge so far and I have learned quite a bit. Still a ways to go...
"Unwrapping" should be a dirty word here. It's not easy sometimes, but I manage to texture without it. Anywho, good luck with that and those nacelle details.
Yes, PM, I did. First thing I do is check to see what type and how many tutorials there are for a program. Xray has very little as far as tutorials are concerned, but it was used to create Baby IronMan, so that says a lot. Do you have any tut links for it?
No, I don't know of any tutorials, but the main site has a demo video. There really isn't much to it. You just draw a line where you want your seam to be, and then you click unwrap using one of the two methods provided by the plug-in.
Wanted to post before this thread got closed, haha. Picked up again where I left off and am continuing on the Enterprise. Took a screen grab of the movie and composited my model into the scene. Did some PS on the scene to add top and bottom to the grab to make it a 1920 x 1080 wallpaper now sitting on my desktop. Hope you like it.
Is that a city beyond the lightning storm in space? It's making me think of the part in "Starship Troopers Invasion" where the ship is gonna crash into Paris.
You must not have seen the 2009 Star Trek remake? This is a screen grab where the bad guys ship is blowing up while being sucked into a black hole. No city, but a huge, enormous ship.
Invasion ain't great but I was really digging the ships (I actually want to merge the new ships with the Imperial SW ships but they're tricky to draw!). There was this weird red and blue on the sides tinge going on, sort of like it's extreme NTSC done at very high resolution rather than "real" HD, if that makes any sense.
Thank you, I was beginning to think Mr. Wilson and I were the only ones on this island ;-) I went pretty much overboard, but I don't care. There are four 4096 maps covering the top saucer - hey, it's not meant to be a game model or animated. But really, it's not too bad with render times at all, and I will do some animation with it in the future. I tried Tobias' technique of spherical unwrapping, but decided to stay with planar and paint my maps that way because the spherical projection tended to pinch the maps, the closer you got to the center of the saucer. There was a lot of trial and error, but hey, that's what it's all about.
Again, thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment - guess now I'll have to keep posting further progress, hahahahah.
That's gonna cost a pretty penny to send a crew out onto that saucer and have them repaint the lettering. Even in the future, government incompetence and overspending is still the norm.
That's gonna cost a pretty penny to send a crew out onto that saucer and have them repaint the lettering. Even in the future, government incompetence and overspending is still the norm.
Well, in Star Trek, money no longer exists... the acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in people's lives. In the normal Star Trek universe, that is.
AMD Ryzen 9 5900X Gigabyte RTX 3080 Gaming OC 12GB 1TB NVMe SSD, 2 x 1GB SATA SSD, 4TB external HDD 32 GB RAM Windows 11 Pro
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Evil, here are a couple of renders. The saucer top has Nightfever's map as a test. It looks really good, but I gotta make my own. The Nacelle is a bit further along than that render, but it's all I have right now. The blades are modeled after a pre-production sketch I found while gathering reference material. Can't recall the link, but when I do, I'll post it here.
The official Art of the film book says that there is no physical glass dome in front of the dome cage. The canon blades are a bit more complicate
Here is a scan from the book:
Gigabyte RTX 3080 Gaming OC 12GB
1TB NVMe SSD, 2 x 1GB SATA SSD, 4TB external HDD
32 GB RAM
Windows 11 Pro
Thanks Mikey, it only gets better from here.
Chris, I try not to look at the whole completed unit, but rather one little piece at a time. Look at a nicely detailed engine - the whole unit is impressive and daunting, the individual components are just a lot of bits and pieces pretty easy to manage. Every piece starts out as a box, cylinder, or plane and then a little bit of Max magic;) Pic is from a hot rod modeling tut I did a while back : http://cg.tutsplus.com/tutorials/autodesk-3d-studio-max/creating-a-next-gen-video-game-hot-rod-the-complete-workflow-day-1/
The program looked very much like the System Restore that comes with windows, but even that does not pop up all by itself. Sooooo, I figured it was a virus, and I was right.
Checking the internet with a search for System Restore virus got me the info I needed to kill the virus and almost get me back up and running. You can imagine my relief, since my Enterprise work was only stored on the almost dead drive.
The virus did damage my boot record, but I just re-wrote that with the copy stored on the drive - now all is good again.
Since it took me all weekend to fix this issue, I had little time to work on my Aztec pattern. I did want to share what I have so far in Illustrator. Since this is vector based, it is resolution independent and will translate nicely into a very sharp map.
The Aztec is looking great so far. :thumb:
Eric
Wanted to post before this thread got closed, haha. Picked up again where I left off and am continuing on the Enterprise. Took a screen grab of the movie and composited my model into the scene. Did some PS on the scene to add top and bottom to the grab to make it a 1920 x 1080 wallpaper now sitting on my desktop. Hope you like it.
1701-24.jpg
Lots more work to be done detailing the model and the dreaded texturing. But working on this keeps me out of trouble
T25M.jpg
Again, thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment - guess now I'll have to keep posting further progress, hahahahah.
[yoda's vice] Go ahead you must go! Updates I'm waiting to see... [/end of yoda's voice]
T26.jpg
Although the bridge section is not too bad, I'm working on refining it since I rechecked some blue ray screen caps. Updates to follow :thumb:
Well, in Star Trek, money no longer exists... the acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in people's lives. In the normal Star Trek universe, that is.
Gigabyte RTX 3080 Gaming OC 12GB
1TB NVMe SSD, 2 x 1GB SATA SSD, 4TB external HDD
32 GB RAM
Windows 11 Pro