The colors depend on how you want to approach it. The studio model had such strong colors because it was the only way to let some of them survive their lighting and color correction progress.
The colors depend on how you want to approach it. The studio model had such strong colors because it was the only way to let some of them survive their lighting and color correction progress.
The studio model (assuming we're talking the refit Enterprise) had the opalescent/iridescent paint, though. I still haven't factored that into my shader, but plan to. The stuff that's in-place now is in addition to that, which is why I'm worried about it being too strong at this stage.
The stuff above the upper shuttlebay has textures now!
Disregard that random crap near the shuttlebay doors; none of that has been UVed or textured yet. I'm going to take care of all the interior texturing once the exteriors are done.
Debating whether to finish off the top of the saucer (transporter pads, escape pods and decals, phasers, and insignia markings) or if I should move on to the sensor array on the bottom of the saucer and then hit the other smaller pieces that are shared between dorsal and ventral in a single pass. Doesn't really matter, I guess.
Edit: And since I haven't mentioned it in a while, I'm up to ~365 hours on this project, 307 of which have been in Blender.
Yeah, the blue on the studio model was really strong, but it appeared less so on screen. The same can be said for the Enterprise-D. It was actually light blue, but it appeared gray on screen.
Oh, duh, of course! File this under "things I knew, but stopped thinking about at inopportune and embarrassing moments." You are both quite right.
Even so, I think I like the overall effect the stronger blues have. I could go through and desaturate the textures easily enough, but I don't think a little color will hurt the Federation.
Haven't done much in Blender for the last week or so, but finally set aside some time to do a little more texturing this evening. Sensor dome has all of its primary texturing on it now. I think this is the last "main" saucer texture (interiors aside).
One of the beautiful things about CGI is that, even if you painted the ship exactly as the studio model was painted, it doesn't have to appear that way in your images. Subtle changes in lighting hues can create a variety of effects. So, if you wanted something to look desaturated, you could achieve this with lighting or even do it in post. Though, I agree, a little color is good. I get tired of Federation ships always being light gray or white. (boring) Even that tan color that they painted the NX-01 shook things up a bit.
I have mixed feelings about this render, but it's progress all the same, so here it is.
Tonight was a big experiment. I wanted to see if I could get decal text onto the ship without having to do a second UV pass or any sort of goofy "cut out a section of polygons and map just it with the registry" process. In addition to standard UV coordinates, Blender also supports "Generated" coordinates, which just use the bounding box of the mesh as a single polygonal span. You can then futz with the generated coordinates by using a vector mapping, or you can just treat the bounding box as your texture's dimension and map 1:1.
That's what I did here. The up side is that it makes positioning text really easy (Though there was a lot of trial and error while I wrapped my head around exactly what Blender was doing behind the scenes...and what Cycles' viewport render was caching, making me think things weren't working when they were! Fortunately, my wife decided to watch over my shoulder for a bit and asked "Well, are you sure it's reloading? Derp, it wasn't!), but the downside is that even a 4K texture (which this is!) looks pixelated, because the actual texture real estate in use is tiny. However, now that I know that Cycles was doing some goofy caching stuff, I should be able to make the vector mapping play with the generated coordinates a little more nicely, which will let me devote a giant texture to just the registry text.
The registry light isn't very effective with all of the extra scene light, which also looks really blah. There's something distinctly different about the underside lighting and the topside lighting, despite the key light for both being the exact same. I'm going to have to investigate why the light quality feels so different. Additionally, I'm thinking about carving in a little light panel to be a physical source for the registry lighting. It bugs me that it seems to come from no where right now.
I also created a shader for the phaser arrays that I'm pretty happy with, mixing Blender's Glass and Velvet shaders to create this neat sort of soft "pseudo crystal" material.
And, yes, the lifeboat hatches are ugly. I know. I just wanted to put some of the hull texture on them to break up the monotony. My ultimate plan, which I'm going to save until the very end because it's easy-but-tedious, is to work up a single hatch with a nice texture all its own and then instance-clone all the other hatches off of it. What you see now are all clones of the original master, but I "froze" them into specific groupings for easier positioning. I'll keep these around for now and use them for position reference when I introduce the instance clones.
If I can figure out a good way to do it, each lifeboat hatch will be individually numbered, too! Maybe. If that proves to be really annoying, I'll probably just give it the ship registry.
Anyway, that's a lot of text to explain away my moderate embarrassment about this render.
These updates almost don't feel worth posting. Agents of SHIELD and watching hockey with the wife ate up most of my time this evening, so I didn't get very much done. That said, a couple of small-but-important additions.
First, the main registry is now its own 4K texture, the largest individual continuous span of texture pixels on the entire model (each saucer "quadrant" is also effectively 4K, with each eighth occupying a 2048 strip). This has improved its clarity dramatically, to the point where I don't feel quite so embarassed showing a close-up render of it. The other small but tedious addition comes in the form of the red "warning brackets" around each of the dorsal phaser strips.
One thing the second render really highlights (other than desperately needing to texture the transporter emitters) is the need for some additional "fake" AO around the base of the A-B-C superstructure. The transition between the saucer and C deck is really jarring right now, glaringly digital even accounting for the poor lighting plaguing the top of the saucer. Adding a little mutual darkening to this area should help. If I had the patience to figure out Blender's AO baking (which Cycles doesn't support, so I'd have to kick out of Cycles, figure my way around Blender Internal, bake out the maps, then switch back -- yuck!), I might just do a proper AO pass and include that as part of all of the textures, but I do not have said patience! There's an AO node in the Cycles shader engine that I might poke at to see what it does, or I might just bite the bullet and paint it in by hand.
For those curious, I calculated that I've now spent over 0.145% of my life working on this project. That's not the computation spanning "when I started" to "now," that's actual hours worked compared to actual hours lived. The "when I started" to "now" percentage is around 4%. A labor of love indeed.
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is a lot of fun. Tonight's episode was cool and there were hints of a possible continuing story in the plot.
The text and other additions are looking good. Personally, I never saw the point of the red lines at the end of the phaser strips, but that's how they did those on most of the TNG-era ships.
A few more small bits of progress tonight. The RCS thrusters on the saucer now have red warning(?) markers around them now and I fleshed out the textures on the saucer rim (previously, it had only the color bands and no spec/bump detail).
I also added (manually, since no easy solution for "baking" the data in presented itself) some darkening at the foot of the A-B-C superstructure to help it sit on the saucer better. While I think it achieves the effect, I also think it's a little too strong right now. I'll back it off some in the future.
Updates are likely to be spotty for a few days. Might have some time to work on it tomorrow, but the wife and I have plans through the weekend.
Finally got around to texturing the transporter pads. There are 35 horizontal dark bands for each pad, which matches the ones on the dorsal saucer of the Galaxy class and seemed like a good benchmark to use. Every transporter pad on the ship is now textured and UVed (huzzah!). I also solidified the darkened line around C-deck. It looked too much like a mesh error. While the new solid band doesn't match any of the existing colors in the set of color swatches I've been trying to stick to, it's at least in the same family and achieves the desired effect of seating C-deck.
Also did some tweaking to the saucer rim around the RCS thruster. Fixed several of the errors I called out in the previous image and futzed around with the placement of the mapped grooves. I'm still not 100% happy with them, but I'm not sure they'll get much better without reworking the UVs so that the entire area has more resolution. As I do not relish that idea, I'm content.
Nothing earth-shattering tonight. I wasn't happy with the resolution on the red RCS thruster markings, so I added some geometry around them to really enforce the definition of those red lines. Didn't require any changes to the texture, but required a bit of vertex pulling in the UV to get it to sit where I'd already painted in the red.
I also threw on a little registry stamp behind the upper shuttlebay, similar to the one on the Galaxy. It's not present on any of the Ambassador studio models, but the studio models are pretty light on registry markings in general.
Still need to carve out an actual surface detail area for the dorsal saucer registry light and then I need to swing down to the bottom of the saucer now and do the ventral registry. At that point, excluding the lifeboats and shuttlebay...the exterior saucer texturing might be done? Maybe? Is there anything I'm obviously missing? Any "little touches" I should throw in before I move on to the rest of the ship?
I go back and forth on the "Decal" bits between textures, and actuall geometry.. I get the crispest lines by slecting individual polys and recolor them .. making the poly become the line, when I try a texture.. it gets to fuzzy, especally close up.. but that just might be me and my "non" texturing skills
I go back and forth on the "Decal" bits between textures, and actuall geometry.. I get the crispest lines by slecting individual polys and recolor them .. making the poly become the line, when I try a texture.. it gets to fuzzy, especally close up.. but that just might be me and my "non" texturing skills
I'm in the same boat. I really need to work on texturing...maybe when the kids move out.
All right, I'm declaring primary texturing on the saucer done!
Self-illumination
Ultra-closeup of the new registry lamp, close enough that the texture resolution breaks down horribly.
The escape pods and interiors (and everything relating to the shuttlebay) still need work, and I want to revisit the phaser shader (which looks weird and very dark from a distance), but UVing and texture painting are in a place that I'm happy with. I still need to fiddle with the overall hull shader to incorporate that iridescent effect, but that's more of a final polish effect.
Fun note: the lights illuminating the registry are still unphysical in their placement and the ventral registry light is even unphysical in its falloff! The curve of the hull just isn't conducive to lighting them in the way they're "supposed" to be lit. It was a toss-up between providing non-traditional, but physically plausible light sources or sticking with the traditional visual configuration and breaking the physicality of it.
I never noticed that the TNG ships, and the Ambassador was closer to that era than TOS, had "transporter pads/emitters" on the hull but I'll add them to my ship.
Thanks, Aresius, evil_genius_180, VALKYRIE013, and Judge Death.!
A month and a half?! Good grief. I feel bad for how little I actually have to show after that much time. Clearly, I have been rather distracted by other things in the interim. In any case, I have started to texture the neck and stardrive section.
I can already see that some of the paneling textures are going to need to be a little better tailored near the seams in the various UV islands, but c'est la vie. I'm also thinking about backing off the saturation of the various colors. I know I said before that I liked the strong paint scheme, but something about it just isn't sitting quite right. Maybe a drastic step isn't called for, but I can't quite place why it bothers me. Anyone have thoughts?
I'm also absurdly unhappy with the lighting setup I have right now. I should probably sit down and just play with lighting for an entire afternoon or something, but lighting's probably something I've struggled with longer than even texturing. I've never concocted a lighting rig for a model that I was really happy with. Anyone have any good resources along those lines they might point me toward? Preferably something that either deals with "real" space lighting or matching the Trek look. (I really dig what tobian has going on in his Endless Pluto Station thread, lighting-wise.)
Personally, I never worry about lights during the WiP stage. I just throw in some lights with the model and cameras and render.
I wouldn't worry about the apparent lack of progress for a month and a half. Some of us have a lot less to show for the same amount of time. The textures are looking great. Personally, I like the strong color scheme.
The reason the previous render(s) look so awful ended up -- as it always does -- being my own forgetfulness! You see, all of the textures feed through a fairly elaborate custom shader Group Node that does fun channel mixing and shadery stuff. The Group Node has settings exposed, resembling the traditional diffuse/specular/bump controls that pretty much everyone's familiar with, to control the strength of the individual textures. I, uh, had totally forgotten that the defaults I originally set for these aren't really ideal.
This is the exact same render, same camera angle, same exact textures, no changes whatsoever to the model. The only difference is a new lighting rig (very, very low environment sky gradient light; very, very low "soft box" light; slightly-less-low upward-facing, camera-vector fill light; bright key light at roughly 90A° angle to the camera) and corrected settings on my shader parameters (diffuse roughness, glossy map strength, glossy map roughness, and bump strength).
Open the previous one and this one side-by-side for ultimate effect
That said, there's still a decent amount of sample noise in this render, despite cranking the samples up to ~3000, so I may try over-lighting it (sample noise tends to happen worse when the light levels are low and the object is large and complex, as it is here) and then futzing with the exposure as a post effect.
Substantially happier with it than I was before, though!
I spent far too much time on this for the amount of physical space it actually occupies on the model, but... airlock door!
All the detailing on that door is textured. It's just a flat triangle fan.
On the downside, I had to crank the sample count up to 4000 (translating to a render time of ~1.5 hours) to get rid of all the sampling noise. May be time to experiment with Cycles settings again and figure out the real cause of the noise. I think it's to do with low light levels, which I should be controlling in post rather than in the first-pass render itself, but I haven't proven that out yet.
If you do those things accurately, it's hard to not spend too much time on them. That's because they're one of the few small details we actually saw close enough on film to get nitpicky about.
Posts
The studio model (assuming we're talking the refit Enterprise) had the opalescent/iridescent paint, though. I still haven't factored that into my shader, but plan to. The stuff that's in-place now is in addition to that, which is why I'm worried about it being too strong at this stage.
The stuff above the upper shuttlebay has textures now!
Disregard that random crap near the shuttlebay doors; none of that has been UVed or textured yet. I'm going to take care of all the interior texturing once the exteriors are done.
Debating whether to finish off the top of the saucer (transporter pads, escape pods and decals, phasers, and insignia markings) or if I should move on to the sensor array on the bottom of the saucer and then hit the other smaller pieces that are shared between dorsal and ventral in a single pass. Doesn't really matter, I guess.
Edit: And since I haven't mentioned it in a while, I'm up to ~365 hours on this project, 307 of which have been in Blender.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Even so, I think I like the overall effect the stronger blues have. I could go through and desaturate the textures easily enough, but I don't think a little color will hurt the Federation.
Haven't done much in Blender for the last week or so, but finally set aside some time to do a little more texturing this evening. Sensor dome has all of its primary texturing on it now. I think this is the last "main" saucer texture (interiors aside).
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
The sensor thingy is looking good.
I have mixed feelings about this render, but it's progress all the same, so here it is.
Tonight was a big experiment. I wanted to see if I could get decal text onto the ship without having to do a second UV pass or any sort of goofy "cut out a section of polygons and map just it with the registry" process. In addition to standard UV coordinates, Blender also supports "Generated" coordinates, which just use the bounding box of the mesh as a single polygonal span. You can then futz with the generated coordinates by using a vector mapping, or you can just treat the bounding box as your texture's dimension and map 1:1.
That's what I did here. The up side is that it makes positioning text really easy (Though there was a lot of trial and error while I wrapped my head around exactly what Blender was doing behind the scenes...and what Cycles' viewport render was caching, making me think things weren't working when they were! Fortunately, my wife decided to watch over my shoulder for a bit and asked "Well, are you sure it's reloading? Derp, it wasn't!), but the downside is that even a 4K texture (which this is!) looks pixelated, because the actual texture real estate in use is tiny. However, now that I know that Cycles was doing some goofy caching stuff, I should be able to make the vector mapping play with the generated coordinates a little more nicely, which will let me devote a giant texture to just the registry text.
The registry light isn't very effective with all of the extra scene light, which also looks really blah. There's something distinctly different about the underside lighting and the topside lighting, despite the key light for both being the exact same. I'm going to have to investigate why the light quality feels so different. Additionally, I'm thinking about carving in a little light panel to be a physical source for the registry lighting. It bugs me that it seems to come from no where right now.
I also created a shader for the phaser arrays that I'm pretty happy with, mixing Blender's Glass and Velvet shaders to create this neat sort of soft "pseudo crystal" material.
And, yes, the lifeboat hatches are ugly. I know. I just wanted to put some of the hull texture on them to break up the monotony. My ultimate plan, which I'm going to save until the very end because it's easy-but-tedious, is to work up a single hatch with a nice texture all its own and then instance-clone all the other hatches off of it. What you see now are all clones of the original master, but I "froze" them into specific groupings for easier positioning. I'll keep these around for now and use them for position reference when I introduce the instance clones.
If I can figure out a good way to do it, each lifeboat hatch will be individually numbered, too!
Anyway, that's a lot of text to explain away my moderate embarrassment about this render.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
First, the main registry is now its own 4K texture, the largest individual continuous span of texture pixels on the entire model (each saucer "quadrant" is also effectively 4K, with each eighth occupying a 2048 strip). This has improved its clarity dramatically, to the point where I don't feel quite so embarassed showing a close-up render of it.
One thing the second render really highlights (other than desperately needing to texture the transporter emitters) is the need for some additional "fake" AO around the base of the A-B-C superstructure. The transition between the saucer and C deck is really jarring right now, glaringly digital even accounting for the poor lighting plaguing the top of the saucer. Adding a little mutual darkening to this area should help. If I had the patience to figure out Blender's AO baking (which Cycles doesn't support, so I'd have to kick out of Cycles, figure my way around Blender Internal, bake out the maps, then switch back -- yuck!), I might just do a proper AO pass and include that as part of all of the textures, but I do not have said patience! There's an AO node in the Cycles shader engine that I might poke at to see what it does, or I might just bite the bullet and paint it in by hand.
For those curious, I calculated that I've now spent over 0.145% of my life working on this project. That's not the computation spanning "when I started" to "now," that's actual hours worked compared to actual hours lived. The "when I started" to "now" percentage is around 4%. A labor of love indeed.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
The text and other additions are looking good. Personally, I never saw the point of the red lines at the end of the phaser strips, but that's how they did those on most of the TNG-era ships.
A few more small bits of progress tonight. The RCS thrusters on the saucer now have red warning(?) markers around them now and I fleshed out the textures on the saucer rim (previously, it had only the color bands and no spec/bump detail).
I also added (manually, since no easy solution for "baking" the data in presented itself) some darkening at the foot of the A-B-C superstructure to help it sit on the saucer better. While I think it achieves the effect, I also think it's a little too strong right now. I'll back it off some in the future.
Updates are likely to be spotty for a few days. Might have some time to work on it tomorrow, but the wife and I have plans through the weekend.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Also did some tweaking to the saucer rim around the RCS thruster. Fixed several of the errors I called out in the previous image and futzed around with the placement of the mapped grooves. I'm still not 100% happy with them, but I'm not sure they'll get much better without reworking the UVs so that the entire area has more resolution. As I do not relish that idea, I'm content.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
It's definitely looking great.
Nothing earth-shattering tonight. I wasn't happy with the resolution on the red RCS thruster markings, so I added some geometry around them to really enforce the definition of those red lines. Didn't require any changes to the texture, but required a bit of vertex pulling in the UV to get it to sit where I'd already painted in the red.
I also threw on a little registry stamp behind the upper shuttlebay, similar to the one on the Galaxy. It's not present on any of the Ambassador studio models, but the studio models are pretty light on registry markings in general.
Still need to carve out an actual surface detail area for the dorsal saucer registry light and then I need to swing down to the bottom of the saucer now and do the ventral registry. At that point, excluding the lifeboats and shuttlebay...the exterior saucer texturing might be done? Maybe? Is there anything I'm obviously missing? Any "little touches" I should throw in before I move on to the rest of the ship?
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Looking good! lots of attention to detail here!
I'm in the same boat. I really need to work on texturing...maybe when the kids move out.
I completely agree. :thumb:
All right, I'm declaring primary texturing on the saucer done!
Self-illumination
Ultra-closeup of the new registry lamp, close enough that the texture resolution breaks down horribly.
The escape pods and interiors (and everything relating to the shuttlebay) still need work, and I want to revisit the phaser shader (which looks weird and very dark from a distance), but UVing and texture painting are in a place that I'm happy with. I still need to fiddle with the overall hull shader to incorporate that iridescent effect, but that's more of a final polish effect.
Fun note: the lights illuminating the registry are still unphysical in their placement and the ventral registry light is even unphysical in its falloff! The curve of the hull just isn't conducive to lighting them in the way they're "supposed" to be lit. It was a toss-up between providing non-traditional, but physically plausible light sources or sticking with the traditional visual configuration and breaking the physicality of it.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
*runs*
I never noticed that the TNG ships, and the Ambassador was closer to that era than TOS, had "transporter pads/emitters" on the hull but I'll add them to my ship.
A month and a half?! Good grief. I feel bad for how little I actually have to show after that much time. Clearly, I have been rather distracted by other things in the interim. In any case, I have started to texture the neck and stardrive section.
I can already see that some of the paneling textures are going to need to be a little better tailored near the seams in the various UV islands, but c'est la vie. I'm also thinking about backing off the saturation of the various colors. I know I said before that I liked the strong paint scheme, but something about it just isn't sitting quite right. Maybe a drastic step isn't called for, but I can't quite place why it bothers me. Anyone have thoughts?
I'm also absurdly unhappy with the lighting setup I have right now. I should probably sit down and just play with lighting for an entire afternoon or something, but lighting's probably something I've struggled with longer than even texturing. I've never concocted a lighting rig for a model that I was really happy with. Anyone have any good resources along those lines they might point me toward? Preferably something that either deals with "real" space lighting or matching the Trek look. (I really dig what tobian has going on in his Endless Pluto Station thread, lighting-wise.)
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
I wouldn't worry about the apparent lack of progress for a month and a half. Some of us have a lot less to show for the same amount of time.
The reason the previous render(s) look so awful ended up -- as it always does -- being my own forgetfulness! You see, all of the textures feed through a fairly elaborate custom shader Group Node that does fun channel mixing and shadery stuff. The Group Node has settings exposed, resembling the traditional diffuse/specular/bump controls that pretty much everyone's familiar with, to control the strength of the individual textures. I, uh, had totally forgotten that the defaults I originally set for these aren't really ideal.
This is the exact same render, same camera angle, same exact textures, no changes whatsoever to the model. The only difference is a new lighting rig (very, very low environment sky gradient light; very, very low "soft box" light; slightly-less-low upward-facing, camera-vector fill light; bright key light at roughly 90A° angle to the camera) and corrected settings on my shader parameters (diffuse roughness, glossy map strength, glossy map roughness, and bump strength).
Open the previous one and this one side-by-side for ultimate effect
That said, there's still a decent amount of sample noise in this render, despite cranking the samples up to ~3000, so I may try over-lighting it (sample noise tends to happen worse when the light levels are low and the object is large and complex, as it is here) and then futzing with the exposure as a post effect.
Substantially happier with it than I was before, though!
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
I spent far too much time on this for the amount of physical space it actually occupies on the model, but... airlock door!
All the detailing on that door is textured. It's just a flat triangle fan.
On the downside, I had to crank the sample count up to 4000 (translating to a render time of ~1.5 hours) to get rid of all the sampling noise. May be time to experiment with Cycles settings again and figure out the real cause of the noise. I think it's to do with low light levels, which I should be controlling in post rather than in the first-pass render itself, but I haven't proven that out yet.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Yours definitely looks good and accurate.