Something else that might be interesting to look into might be windows on either side of th bridge in those recesses. I can see where the turbolifts are, but it might be something to consider later on on some other ship.
An interesting idea! I don't think it would work on this ship, in a practical sense, simply because of the bridge layout in question, but definitely something that could look neat in another bridge module. Step off of the bridge to stare out into space for a bit.
Yeah, I'm waiting for that also. Of course, it's more than just Valve, the individual game makers have to port their games to Linux for Steam to be able to offer them. The ones that run DosBox shouldn't be an issue, DosBox already works in Linux. However, Games for Windows could be an issue, especially for some of the older games.
Yeah, but Valve has enough industry clout that it can lead a charge that others will follow, especially if they can spearhead an industry-wide switch to OpenGL from DirectX.
Though, I also need to find some CGI software I like that runs in Linux. I've tried all of the free ones, I need to look into some paid software that's Linux compatible.
Having had a bizarre trajectory that took me from trueSpace to LightWave to Maya to Max back to Maya to Blender, I've found Blender to be almost as much (and sometimes more) of a joy to model in as (than) LightWave, which was my favorite of the others until I made the switch from the big-money apps to open-source. In what ways was Blender not to your liking, if you don't mind my asking?
Nothing dazzling tonight, sadly. More panel lines on B and C decks, and starting on the detailing for the flat area above the C deck shuttlebay. I still haven't actually beveled the edges on these panel lines, since I have a few more to put in around that large piece of detailing in the back and I wanted to hit them all at once. Was going to do it tonight, but ran out of time.
For those curious, Blender tells me that the whole model weighs in at around 1.64 million faces, with 2.31 million verts. Something like half of those faces are in the saucer, due to the density of the grids.
In what ways was Blender not to your liking, if you don't mind my asking?
It's mostly a combination of small things. Various tools don't act the way I'd like them to. Beveling and extruding is very imprecise, drawing splines is a pain in the butt, the smooth or faceted thing goes from one extreme to the other with no real middle ground, you can only lathe around the cursor thing. I also didn't like the lack of ngons, but I think that's been fixed by now. I think that's mainly what I didn't like, modeling wise. I generally like texturing and rendering with it, though I never got far enough to understand the nodes and some other stuff. Overall, I just didn't care for the feel of the program VS what I'm used to.
I like Lightwave better, but the whole "Windows only" thing is pissing me off. Plus, it's very expensive. (not as bad as Max or Maya but expensive) AC3D has a Linux version (Linux native, no Wine) and it's only $100. I may try their 14-day trial at some point.
It's mostly a combination of small things. Various tools don't act the way I'd like them to. Beveling and extruding is very imprecise, drawing splines is a pain in the butt, the smooth or faceted thing goes from one extreme to the other with no real middle ground, you can only lathe around the cursor thing. I also didn't like the lack of ngons, but I think that's been fixed by now. I think that's mainly what I didn't like, modeling wise. I generally like texturing and rendering with it, though I never got far enough to understand the nodes and some other stuff. Overall, I just didn't care for the feel of the program VS what I'm used to.
It actually sounds like many of your grievances are due to issues in older versions of Blender. When they crossed the 2.5 version line, a lot of that stuff improved (especially the NGons!).
Edit Mode Beveling is still a big weak spot, but there are ways around it using the Bevel modifier and weighted edges, the workflow for which really isn't a lot different than just selecting an edge and beveling it. The Edit Mode Bevel does work, but as you pointed out it's very imprecise and often "wrong" as far as the normal angle it chooses to create the new bevel face. They're actively working on improving it, so this will only get better.
I've actually found Blender's extrude tools to be some of the best, though they're not all under a single umbrella. One technique I've been using a lot with this model, for the grids and windows, is a 0-distance extrude, followed by a Shrink/Fatten operation, which works a lot like LightWave's "Smooth Shift" (at least, what I remember LightWave's smooth shift doing back in v7 ).
I haven't done a lot of spline drawing, but the little I have done tells me two things. First, as with most things, Blender doesn't necessarily conceptualize splines in the "conventional" way that LW/Max/Maya do, which for many people is a turn-off. I always encourage people to engage with Blender on its terms, rather than expecting it to conform to their expectations. When you do that, rather than expecting it to behave essentially like every other 3D package, a lot of doors open up. Second, that Blender's spline system is actually (probably) quite powerful, if you take the time to learn it. I haven't done so, because I haven't needed to do so thus far.
Now, to each his own. If you don't like Blender, don't want to revisit it, don't want to spend the time getting used to its way of doing things, that is of course entirely your prerogative! For my part, I was sick of worrying about whether one license version or another was still valid, worrying about whether a given work license could be legally used at home, and paying exorbitant amounts of money. Blender offered me a full, comprehensive suite of CG tools and required only that I take the time to understand how to approach things in order to achieve the result I wanted.
At this stage, I would surmise that my modeling proficiency in Blender is equal to or greater than my proficiency in LightWave ever was, and certainly exceeds my proficiency in Max or Maya, both of which I used and supported professionally for a collective six years. That's not necessarily any great claim; as I've lamented in this thread, I feel that I'm a very slow modeler despite the span of time that I've been modeling. That's always been true, though, regardless of the particular CG package I was using.
Kicked this off last night, but didn't want to wait around for it to finish rendering!
Finished the panel lines for B and C deck, cut in the upper shuttlebay, and added some of the detailing in above the shuttle bay. Still more detailing to be added, large and small.
Well I made the lower one's port holes, I think for a corridor that runs around the bridge... something like a viewing gallery or something.. I like the lights though good work!
The grain is due to Cycles not having enough iterations. I've been doing these at 1500 iterations, which takes 35-50 minutes to render. I don't really want to crank it up higher, since it would increase the render times further, but neither can I put it any lower without getting even grainier. However, I hear tell that a new incremental version of Blender is in the wild now, with a muchly improved Cycles renderer, so this may change...
A very interesting question! I'm not actually sure. At a guess, I'd say they have something to do with replenishing or maintaining the atmosphere in the shuttlebay. The forward blocks are ribbed, which suggests something requiring greater surface area. That makes me think of some kind of heat sink or radiator. The blocks toward the rear, though? No idea.
Here's a good black and white close-up of this area, which I based these pieces off of.
Well I made the lower one's port holes, I think for a corridor that runs around the bridge... something like a viewing gallery or something..
I don't think you can really fit a deck there, even if you go with the larger of the two sizes. I suppose you could have offset deck heights or something, with the interior deck sloping downward, but that seems like an awful waste of space.
Here's a good black and white close-up of this area, which I based these pieces off of.
That picture actually makes me think of Guitar Hero. Just learn those buttons and you can pretend to be a starship captain.
They kind of look like hatches, but you got a big door there, why would they need more hatches? Maybe one set is shield generator panels...
Oh, for those lights along the floor-ish area, I'm remembering that window near the floor that Picard shows Lily Earth from orbit in First Contact. Never understood why that was there (at that point on the wall) but maybe there's something like that there.
^ That was a hatch - remember no transparent aluminum - and if I'm not mistaken it was on a deck on either the underside of the saucer or (more likely) the engineering hull.
I got excited on Wednesday about the new(ish) Blender release that included CPU-threaded rendering for Cycles, since my AMD graphics card isn't well-supported to exploit the GPU-accelerated features that nVidia cards can use with Cycles' CUDA features. I fired up the new Blender to try it out, with the initial hope that maybe the new release would have better OpenCL support for my card to use the GPU-accelerated features. After a lot of crashing, I decided that the answer to that one was "no." Despondent and annoyed with such high render times for WIP renders, I thought about abandoning Cycles for the remainder of the model build process, but realized pretty quickly that I knew a lot more about the Cycles render workflow than I did Blender Internal. Ultimately, I just got frustrated with the whole thing and made no forward progress that evening. I decided to watch some Community with the wife, instead.
Last night was a different story! I started by adding a few more details to the machinery above the secondary shuttlebay, and beveling/finishing the detailing on the roof of B Deck. Then I spent some time experimenting with different lighting setups, abandoning my three spherical emission objects in favor of three point lights of varying radii, colors, and intensities. I like the final result a lot more, and it's slightly faster to render. But I also decided that render times didn't really matter at this stage, since I could kick them off to run over night. To that end, I cranked up my sample count from 1500 to 4000. My 1500-sample renders were taking ~30-45 minutes. This one took 1:40 (that's hours and minutes, not minutes and seconds), but it fixes a lot of the grain. Not all, but a lot.
In the further interest of reducing the footprint of the model, and the corresponding render time, I decided to start optimizing the grid troughs on the saucer. When I made them, I had just started figuring my way around that particular method. I've since refined it quite a bit, but the saucer still suffers from the old method. As such, I'm going through and cleaning up unnecessary geometry in those troughs. I did about half of the work on the upper saucer (the part "above" the sloped middle band) last night, which netted me a triangle reduction on the order of over 55,000, once you factor in mirroring and such. That's a lot of tiny, unnecessary polygons -- and they are, indeed, completely unnecessary; the triangles I removed added no surface detail whatsoever. I think doing this drudge-work will pay off handsomely once I get to the lower saucer, which has even more gridlines than does the upper saucer.
This weekend is likely to be pretty busy, so I may not be able to post another update until Monday or Tuesday.
A friend of mine took a look and the first thing that popped into his head was that they might be tractor beam emitters. He pointed out that they looked a great deal like encased versions of the portable tractor beam emitter Wesley built in an episode of TNG. I think I'll detail them up operating under this assumption!
Wow, those are some long render times. Too bad the threading support doesn't work on your machine. Just out of curiosity, do you know how long it would have taken to render that with the Blender internal renderer?
I've spent the last several hours rebuilding the saucer grids from the ground up, combining the optimization work I was already doing with new grids that are about 1/3 as wide (and will be 1/3 as deep -- 5cm as compared to 15cm) as the previous grids, which will match the panel/grid lines seen on C and B deck. Nothing interesting to show for it yet, and only about 1/4 of the way through optimizing the grids on the dorsal saucer surface so far. :argh: May be a bit before there's anything perdy to look at.
But at long last, I finally managed to trawl through fixing the entirety of the dorsal shield grid. There is still some optimization to be done in here, but I think I'll save that to the very end. Took a little over eight hours of work to get it this far.
The lighting did something interesting to this, which makes some of the grids look like they disappeared; they're all still there, though.
I still have to re-do the ventral grids, but that won't be nearly as big a pain because I won't have to re-integrate already-existing window panels. Maybe now I can get back to making forward progress!
Spent some time this evening adding some detailing to the tractor beam emitters. Material on these is temporary (well, all the materials are temporary, really); it's just the window frame material. I just wanted a different color on them than the off-white or blue-gray I've been using elsewhere. Planning to add a few more rounded panels to the emitters so that the rest of the surface doesn't look so plain. I also stubbed in some shuttlebay doors and gave the conference room a temporary image map.
This render makes obvious some interesting smoothing errors around the shuttlebay that I'll need to take a closer look at.
More greebles! Escape pod hatches, transporter pads, equipment access panels on the tractor beam emitters and...a running light. Placement of the escape pod hatches is inspired by, but not beholden to, the Enterprise-C layout. I modified the placement to suit the lines and window arrangement of my model.
Managed to clean up some of the smoothing garbage around the shuttlebay, but not all of it. Spent a good 30 minutes or so dinking around with that weird smoothing error above the shuttlebay, right along the midline, but I'm still not sure what's causing it. Face angles are smooth, no duplicate verts, faces, or edges. Only seems to happen under these lighting conditions, too; if I add another light pretty much anywhere, it goes away.
For those keeping track, total time spent on the model is fast approaching 140 hours.
Managed to clean up some of the smoothing garbage around the shuttlebay, but not all of it. Spent a good 30 minutes or so dinking around with that weird smoothing error above the shuttlebay, right along the midline, but I'm still not sure what's causing it. Face angles are smooth, no duplicate verts, faces, or edges. Only seems to happen under these lighting conditions, too; if I add another light pretty much anywhere, it goes away.
It's probably a lighting artifact due to the angle of the face in relation to the light (or something like that.) You sometimes get weird stuff like that in CGI. If it's not showing up under any other lighting conditions, I wouldn't worry much about it. I've learned to ignore those things over the years.
Some additional smoothing errors have come to light, though I framed this render to obscure them. The polygons around the windows on the edge of the saucer are completely borked in the regions where bright light is fading to blackness. It looks fine in the OpenGL preview, so it's damn hard to diagnose.
Aft saucer phasers are now in, and I went through and divided each of the phaser strips into ~2.5m emitters. The design I'm using here is the one implied by the TNG Technical Manual, which matches the behavior shown in the show, but diverges widely from the more complex-looking phaser arrays seen on later models.
Also visible are the ugly smoothing errors around the rim windows. I think I know what's causing this now, though, and it's easy to fix. When I cut the new grids, the hull panels that existed before no longer perfectly lined up with the grid insets. In most cases, this wasn't an issue, but there's enough of a curvature on the saucer rim to make the mismatch a lot more evident. Fix is just to select all of the window frames and scale them inward ever so slightly. I've done this in a few places already, but it wasn't until this render that I realized it was a problem across the entirety of the rim.
Posts
An interesting idea! I don't think it would work on this ship, in a practical sense, simply because of the bridge layout in question, but definitely something that could look neat in another bridge module. Step off of the bridge to stare out into space for a bit.
Yeah, but Valve has enough industry clout that it can lead a charge that others will follow, especially if they can spearhead an industry-wide switch to OpenGL from DirectX.
Having had a bizarre trajectory that took me from trueSpace to LightWave to Maya to Max back to Maya to Blender, I've found Blender to be almost as much (and sometimes more) of a joy to model in as (than) LightWave, which was my favorite of the others until I made the switch from the big-money apps to open-source. In what ways was Blender not to your liking, if you don't mind my asking?
Nothing dazzling tonight, sadly. More panel lines on B and C decks, and starting on the detailing for the flat area above the C deck shuttlebay. I still haven't actually beveled the edges on these panel lines, since I have a few more to put in around that large piece of detailing in the back and I wanted to hit them all at once. Was going to do it tonight, but ran out of time.
For those curious, Blender tells me that the whole model weighs in at around 1.64 million faces, with 2.31 million verts. Something like half of those faces are in the saucer, due to the density of the grids.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
It's mostly a combination of small things. Various tools don't act the way I'd like them to. Beveling and extruding is very imprecise, drawing splines is a pain in the butt, the smooth or faceted thing goes from one extreme to the other with no real middle ground, you can only lathe around the cursor thing. I also didn't like the lack of ngons, but I think that's been fixed by now. I think that's mainly what I didn't like, modeling wise. I generally like texturing and rendering with it, though I never got far enough to understand the nodes and some other stuff. Overall, I just didn't care for the feel of the program VS what I'm used to.
I like Lightwave better, but the whole "Windows only" thing is pissing me off. Plus, it's very expensive. (not as bad as Max or Maya but expensive) AC3D has a Linux version (Linux native, no Wine) and it's only $100. I may try their 14-day trial at some point.
Edit Mode Beveling is still a big weak spot, but there are ways around it using the Bevel modifier and weighted edges, the workflow for which really isn't a lot different than just selecting an edge and beveling it. The Edit Mode Bevel does work, but as you pointed out it's very imprecise and often "wrong" as far as the normal angle it chooses to create the new bevel face. They're actively working on improving it, so this will only get better.
I've actually found Blender's extrude tools to be some of the best, though they're not all under a single umbrella. One technique I've been using a lot with this model, for the grids and windows, is a 0-distance extrude, followed by a Shrink/Fatten operation, which works a lot like LightWave's "Smooth Shift" (at least, what I remember LightWave's smooth shift doing back in v7
I haven't done a lot of spline drawing, but the little I have done tells me two things. First, as with most things, Blender doesn't necessarily conceptualize splines in the "conventional" way that LW/Max/Maya do, which for many people is a turn-off. I always encourage people to engage with Blender on its terms, rather than expecting it to conform to their expectations. When you do that, rather than expecting it to behave essentially like every other 3D package, a lot of doors open up. Second, that Blender's spline system is actually (probably) quite powerful, if you take the time to learn it. I haven't done so, because I haven't needed to do so thus far.
Now, to each his own.
At this stage, I would surmise that my modeling proficiency in Blender is equal to or greater than my proficiency in LightWave ever was, and certainly exceeds my proficiency in Max or Maya, both of which I used and supported professionally for a collective six years. That's not necessarily any great claim; as I've lamented in this thread, I feel that I'm a very slow modeler despite the span of time that I've been modeling. That's always been true, though, regardless of the particular CG package I was using.
There's my two cents. :thumb:
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Finished the panel lines for B and C deck, cut in the upper shuttlebay, and added some of the detailing in above the shuttle bay. Still more detailing to be added, large and small.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
LINK
The grain is due to Cycles not having enough iterations. I've been doing these at 1500 iterations, which takes 35-50 minutes to render. I don't really want to crank it up higher, since it would increase the render times further, but neither can I put it any lower without getting even grainier. However, I hear tell that a new incremental version of Blender is in the wild now, with a muchly improved Cycles renderer, so this may change...
A very interesting question! I'm not actually sure. At a guess, I'd say they have something to do with replenishing or maintaining the atmosphere in the shuttlebay. The forward blocks are ribbed, which suggests something requiring greater surface area. That makes me think of some kind of heat sink or radiator. The blocks toward the rear, though? No idea.
Here's a good black and white close-up of this area, which I based these pieces off of.
I don't think you can really fit a deck there, even if you go with the larger of the two sizes. I suppose you could have offset deck heights or something, with the interior deck sloping downward, but that seems like an awful waste of space.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
That picture actually makes me think of Guitar Hero. Just learn those buttons and you can pretend to be a starship captain.
They kind of look like hatches, but you got a big door there, why would they need more hatches? Maybe one set is shield generator panels...
Oh, for those lights along the floor-ish area, I'm remembering that window near the floor that Picard shows Lily Earth from orbit in First Contact. Never understood why that was there (at that point on the wall) but maybe there's something like that there.
Wiring access.
(as to their fictional function, I have no idea)
Last night was a different story! I started by adding a few more details to the machinery above the secondary shuttlebay, and beveling/finishing the detailing on the roof of B Deck. Then I spent some time experimenting with different lighting setups, abandoning my three spherical emission objects in favor of three point lights of varying radii, colors, and intensities. I like the final result a lot more, and it's slightly faster to render. But I also decided that render times didn't really matter at this stage, since I could kick them off to run over night. To that end, I cranked up my sample count from 1500 to 4000. My 1500-sample renders were taking ~30-45 minutes. This one took 1:40 (that's hours and minutes, not minutes and seconds), but it fixes a lot of the grain. Not all, but a lot.
In the further interest of reducing the footprint of the model, and the corresponding render time, I decided to start optimizing the grid troughs on the saucer. When I made them, I had just started figuring my way around that particular method. I've since refined it quite a bit, but the saucer still suffers from the old method. As such, I'm going through and cleaning up unnecessary geometry in those troughs. I did about half of the work on the upper saucer (the part "above" the sloped middle band) last night, which netted me a triangle reduction on the order of over 55,000, once you factor in mirroring and such. That's a lot of tiny, unnecessary polygons -- and they are, indeed, completely unnecessary; the triangles I removed added no surface detail whatsoever. I think doing this drudge-work will pay off handsomely once I get to the lower saucer, which has even more gridlines than does the upper saucer.
This weekend is likely to be pretty busy, so I may not be able to post another update until Monday or Tuesday.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
A friend of mine took a look and the first thing that popped into his head was that they might be tractor beam emitters. He pointed out that they looked a great deal like encased versions of the portable tractor beam emitter Wesley built in an episode of TNG. I think I'll detail them up operating under this assumption!
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Wow, those are some long render times. Too bad the threading support doesn't work on your machine. Just out of curiosity, do you know how long it would have taken to render that with the Blender internal renderer?
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
But at long last, I finally managed to trawl through fixing the entirety of the dorsal shield grid. There is still some optimization to be done in here, but I think I'll save that to the very end. Took a little over eight hours of work to get it this far.
The lighting did something interesting to this, which makes some of the grids look like they disappeared; they're all still there, though.
I still have to re-do the ventral grids, but that won't be nearly as big a pain because I won't have to re-integrate already-existing window panels. Maybe now I can get back to making forward progress!
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
I don't remember what I said that about, but I'm sure I was being sarcastic about it being fun.
(yes, I'm too lazy to go back a page and look
This render makes obvious some interesting smoothing errors around the shuttlebay that I'll need to take a closer look at.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
More greebles! Escape pod hatches, transporter pads, equipment access panels on the tractor beam emitters and...a running light. Placement of the escape pod hatches is inspired by, but not beholden to, the Enterprise-C layout. I modified the placement to suit the lines and window arrangement of my model.
Managed to clean up some of the smoothing garbage around the shuttlebay, but not all of it. Spent a good 30 minutes or so dinking around with that weird smoothing error above the shuttlebay, right along the midline, but I'm still not sure what's causing it. Face angles are smooth, no duplicate verts, faces, or edges. Only seems to happen under these lighting conditions, too; if I add another light pretty much anywhere, it goes away.
For those keeping track, total time spent on the model is fast approaching 140 hours.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
It's probably a lighting artifact due to the angle of the face in relation to the light (or something like that.) You sometimes get weird stuff like that in CGI. If it's not showing up under any other lighting conditions, I wouldn't worry much about it. I've learned to ignore those things over the years.
Phasers and escape pod hatches for everyone!
Some additional smoothing errors have come to light, though I framed this render to obscure them. The polygons around the windows on the edge of the saucer are completely borked in the regions where bright light is fading to blackness. It looks fine in the OpenGL preview, so it's damn hard to diagnose.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Aft saucer phasers are now in, and I went through and divided each of the phaser strips into ~2.5m emitters. The design I'm using here is the one implied by the TNG Technical Manual, which matches the behavior shown in the show, but diverges widely from the more complex-looking phaser arrays seen on later models.
Also visible are the ugly smoothing errors around the rim windows. I think I know what's causing this now, though, and it's easy to fix. When I cut the new grids, the hull panels that existed before no longer perfectly lined up with the grid insets. In most cases, this wasn't an issue, but there's enough of a curvature on the saucer rim to make the mismatch a lot more evident. Fix is just to select all of the window frames and scale them inward ever so slightly. I've done this in a few places already, but it wasn't until this render that I realized it was a problem across the entirety of the rim.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
I know what's causing it too. You used the booleans in Blender.