True enough, though it's taken about 9 years to get to this point (I finished off Simon's back in 2004. One can see it on the front of the ships of the line book and in various other places).
Nope, it does have them. It's the bottom removable hatch on the model for mounting purposes. So you don't see it in many shots.
Ah, gotcha. They sure do like to make the part with the phasers removable on these things.
Though, looking at my references, I do see them in a screenshot from STIII, where they "stalled" the Excelsior. However, the ship still has no aft coverage. Just torpedoes, no phasers.
Yes, the refit definitely has aft phasers just above the shuttlebay. Unlike the underside phasers, those aren't on a missing piece and can clearly be seen in reference pictures. Some fan blueprints of the Excelsior/Ent-B put some phasers back there on that ship as well, but it doesn't have them.
Nice analysis of the airlock. I've just started messing with that area on my Rapier and I was using Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise as a rough guide. The neck came out nicely as well. :thumb:
That airlock's looking great! With my OCD I'd have been tempted to put in a shallow 'true vertical' insert to get round the problem, but as you say this is space; so why not do it this way!
Are you looking to include docking ports anywhere else, ala 1701 refit?
Nope, it does have them. It's the bottom removable hatch on the model for mounting purposes. So you don't see it in many shots.
My goodness, it does seem I was rather conclusively wrong in saying that the Galaxy was the first depicted class with ventral phasers! Thanks for fact-checking me (and to you, too, evil_genius_180)! I actually really appreciate it when people fact-check bad conclusions and I am glad to have been corrected! :thumb:
This image was the one that conclusively sealed for me that the Ambassador lacked a ventral array:
With my OCD I'd have been tempted to put in a shallow 'true vertical' insert to get round the problem, but as you say this is space; so why not do it this way!
I was very tempted for a few minutes!
Are you looking to include docking ports anywhere else, ala 1701 refit?
I thought about it, but ultimately decided against it. The Ambassador has two very large shuttlebays rather than the single main bay seen on its predecessors and successors (with ancillary bays in the case of the Galaxy; I don't really know what that underside...bay-thing is on the Excelsior -- I've seen it referred to as cargo processing, the actual shuttlebay with the apparent shuttlebay actually a cargo loading bay, and so on). I imagine most of its support craft traffic is going to make use of these two bays and their attendant facilities rather than the travel pods.
Tonight, I am one area short of declaring the secondary hull done! Additions: two additional lifeboat pairs in the undercut/notch/whatever, cargo loading hatches, dorsal and ventral running lights along the center line, a housing for the shuttlebay maintenance facilities, emergency deuterium venting ports, hatches concealing the deuterium fueling ports, and bits along the spine.
All that remains (unless your eagle eyes spot something I've omitted) is the detailing around the secondary hull's shuttlebay (for which I'll be riffing on the detailing from the refit Constitution) and the doors themselves. Then it's on to the pylons!
(Side Note: I just realized that most of my images were huge, owing to being saved by Blender as 100% quality JPEGs with no optimization. I've run them all through Photoshop's Save For Web and they are all substantially less enormous now. This doesn't have any effect on the thumbnails that are embedded here in the thread, but rather the images you see when you click on the thumbnails.)
That airlock's looking great! With my OCD I'd have been tempted to put in a shallow 'true vertical' insert to get round the problem, but as you say this is space; so why not do it this way!
Well, docking manouvers will require a better expertise.
One idea ocurred to me: Placing the rear torpedo launcher at the bottom of the cutout instead of itAâs "top", wonAât give her a better coverage for firing? IAâm not asking you to move it, itAâs just an idea. By other side, I think that one or two little turrets over the shuttlebay, like in the "A", would be welcome. Just a suggestion.
All other additions that you made, are looking perfect! :thumb:
One idea ocurred to me: Placing the rear torpedo launcher at the bottom of the cutout instead of itAâs "top", wonAât give her a better coverage for firing? IAâm not asking you to move it, itAâs just an idea.
You sacrifice coverage in one firing arc or another, no matter where you put the aft launcher, just like you sacrifice coverage in the front arc by having a torpedo launcher at the base of the neck -- anything above the plane of the saucer isn't within the firing arc. Fortunately, space combat ranges are typically so large (despite what you see on TV ) that it will rarely matter!
By other side, I think that one or two little turrets over the shuttlebay, like in the "A", would be welcome. Just a suggestion.
Though I have toyed with the idea, I'm not quite comfortable with putting movie-era turrets on a ship otherwise outfitted with phaser arrays. I feel like phaser arrays represent a sea change in Starfleet's armament and once they started designing ships with them, they didn't mix the two types.
That said, I might put an array on either side of the shuttlebay...
Spent a bunch of time putting some greebles into the insets on either side of the stardrive shuttlebay, inspired by the detailing on the Constitution refit and, finally, started in on the doors.
(Ignore the weird jagged stepping along the middle of the image; that's more of that strange lighting artifact that doesn't seem to have any cause.)
Clamshell doors are hard! I think I finally came up with something I don't hate, though. What you see here isn't complete (which is why it looks so terrible! ), but it's at least progress and having not posted for a few days, I thought I should put in some kind of update! Each door segment slides over the next one. All but segment three (counting the rear-most/outer-most segment as segment one) do so without any clipping. I'll probably have to give segment three a very different pivot point to make it rotate correctly. Also, only segment one has rounded edges at this point, which is another reason the other segments look so unpolished. Once I have the segments sliding over each other properly, I'll put some detailing into the hull that indicates each segment's individual track that it travels along.
(Tried to post this last night, but the site kept timing out for me.)
Finished up reshaping and rounding the edges on the door segments. Still need to add some detailing to them and the tracks they travel along.
In addition to the usual render, I decided to do a little animation test to see how they looked while opening. It's just an OpenGL render rather than a full Cycles render, since it didn't seem worth doing a full-quality render for a test animation.
Timing's roughly based on the door sequence from ST5, with each door segment taking three seconds to move into position over the neighboring segment and the all-segments opening sequence taking 12 seconds. The ST5 scene showed that the doors can be opened selectively, so you wouldn't necessarily need to open all four segments on each side to their full extension to admit a single shuttle. I imagine the full-wide opening is for high-traffic situations, as might be found when the ship is in drydock.
Gotta be honest, not a fan of these doors. I personally favour more straightened segments, ala the Ent-A/refit (so feel free to call me biased! )
Argh, whyyyyy do you say these things?
I agree with you completely, actually. My original plan was to make them with straightened segments, just like the A...until I realized I'd modeled the cutout for curved doors! I thought, "Well, you can either re-do the details in those dark insets and reshape the cutout, or you can just make curved doors." The latter seemed easier.
Truth be told, the latter wasn't easier at all and they don't look nearly as good. What's more the C actually has A-like doors (though the Yamaguchi variant has more rounded doors)! :argh:
Sigh. Guess I'll go re-do that cutout. And the doors.
Ended up going down some dumb rabbit holes while redoing the doors, but here they are, all nice and animated. Originally, I was trying distort the shape so that top-down curve was "longer" than it was "wide," but when this proved absurd to try and animate, I decided to step back and just make the whole thing circular. It's now substantially easier to animate and ended up looking way better!
Ignore the pause between each segment. The ultimate plan is to stagger them a bit, so as one is slowing down/ending, the next one will be starting to move. It'll still give it a sort of wave of motion appearance, but it won't be so staggered, the way it does now.
At long last, I think the secondary hull is done! The doors now have sunken troughs to slide along, which give the doors a visual termination point. When I get around to texturing, I'll be adding little skid/wear marks along the paths each door takes to indicate use and such. Also mangled the detail inset so that it matches the new shape of the doors, and I also made it about six times as deep as it was, which makes those details a lot more visible now. Added some access panels (for emergency door opening, I suppose?) to the outermost bay door. Completely rebuilt the shuttlebay interior and interior/exterior hull transition point so that it's nice and smooth. Once again immensely grateful that someone wrote such a flexible Fillet add-on. A lot of this work would be significantly harder without it!
My checklist of remaining modeling tasks only has another 10 or so things on it (though two of those things are simply "upper/lower shuttlebay interior," so not all items are created equal). Then I have another dozen items for texturing and lighting, and over half of those are just "UV (name of part)." The actual texture work is just lumped into "paint hull diffuse texture" and "paint hull spec/normal textures." :rolleyes:
But that, at least, will be a gearshift from modeling!
Spent some time with my old friends, the warp nacelles, this evening. Spent far too much time fooling around with the subsurface cages before finally freezing them, added in the Bussard field emitters (or whatever the orange bits are!), the insets on top of the nacelles, running lights, and refined the shape of the internal warp coils a bit.
Whole thing is just under a million polygons at present, with all its subsurfaces frozen and as optimized as I'm going to bother optimizing them.
There are a few bits of detailing left to do (including the RCS thrusters), I need to amp up the subdivisions on the warp field grilles in the back, and then do the internal plasma injector mechanism (which should also help how see-through the back of the nacelle is right now).
Then there are a few things to fix/add to the saucer...and it's on to interiors!
How'd you do the blue areas? Bitmap or hardmodelled?
BTW, I notice the saucer has no impulse engines, but neither does the model. I guess the props department was in a rush when they made the model for yesterday's enterprise and figurted it didn't matter...:rolleyes:
I really like the way the coils are visible inside the nacelles, BTW, that's the best touch here.
The nav lights placed over the naceles appears to be a bit small than it should be...
I had the exact thought, but I can't figure out why they look so small; they're the exact same size as all of the other nav lights, yet they look tiny.
How'd you do the blue areas? Bitmap or hardmodelled?
All hard modeled. The only image maps used anywhere right now are for the room interiors, and even those are slated for complete overhaul once I start texturing. None of the materials you see are anywhere near final, either. Only the glowing bits are anything other than single-color Diffuse BSDFs.
On the topic of materials, I'm planning (we'll see if this bears out) to do something fun with the hull material. In addition to the usual painted color map, I want to make the material itself subtly iridescent, throwing off greenish, purplish, or blueish fresnel bounce depending on the angle of view. This would couple with the spec/gloss map to try to achieve an effect similar to that of the original Enterprise refit model. If it works like I hope it will, it should turn out quite nice, especially when in motion. It could end up looking like crap, though. We shall see!
BTW, I notice the saucer has no impulse engines, but neither does the model. I guess the props department was in a rush when they made the model for yesterday's enterprise and figurted it didn't matter...:rolleyes:
Yeah... :rolleyes: I suppose one could speculate that there's an impulse engine embedded inside the saucer where it joins the neck for emergency separation, but there's definitely no sign of one mounted on the exterior.
Nacelle exteriors are done. Increased the subdivisions of the warp field grille, added a little bit of detailing where the nacelle and the pylon meet based on some vague shadowy shapes in one reference image (that don't show up in any other, but looked kind of cool!), added the RCS thrusters to the end of the nacelle, and stubbed in a very rough version of the plasma injector observation room.
Remaining things to model:
The actual RCS thrusters exhaust vents that will go into the exhaust ports (because that level of detail is totally necessary :rolleyes:)
Some quick cleanup on the detailing around the bridge.
The upper shuttlebay doors.
The lower shuttlebay interior.
The upper shuttlebay interior.
The conference room interior.
And...that's it. Then, at long last, it's on to texturing.
Was planning to have all this done yesterday, but had a bit of a blizzard to contend with. Lost power just before 8pm (after three 5-second blackouts over the course of the preceding hour), got it back around noon today. Then the wife and I spent the next three hours clearing out the driveway. Even with a snowblower, we're both sore as hell now.
Anyway, here are the now totally done nacelles, complete with ridiculous probably-never-to-be-actually-seen interior mechanisms!
Facing forward, showing the Bussard plasma feeds and primary injector assembly.
Facing aft, showing the nacelle operations room. May decide to add some more bits to that back wall, more or less mirroring the front wall and giving a conduit for the plasma stream to follow, but...meh?
Posts
True enough, though it's taken about 9 years to get to this point (I finished off Simon's back in 2004. One can see it on the front of the ships of the line book and in various other places).
Ah, gotcha. They sure do like to make the part with the phasers removable on these things.
Though, looking at my references, I do see them in a screenshot from STIII, where they "stalled" the Excelsior. However, the ship still has no aft coverage. Just torpedoes, no phasers.
The 4 phasers on the bottom of the rear hull are confirmed, and best seen when the strobe flashes.
Blueprints here show the locations of the rear and ventral phasers.
http://www.startrek-wallpapers.com/bulkupload/startrek/Star%20Trek%20Original/Enterprise-NCC-1701-A-Schematics.jpg
Yes, the refit definitely has aft phasers just above the shuttlebay. Unlike the underside phasers, those aren't on a missing piece and can clearly be seen in reference pictures. Some fan blueprints of the Excelsior/Ent-B put some phasers back there on that ship as well, but it doesn't have them.
Are you looking to include docking ports anywhere else, ala 1701 refit?
My goodness, it does seem I was rather conclusively wrong in saying that the Galaxy was the first depicted class with ventral phasers! Thanks for fact-checking me (and to you, too, evil_genius_180)! I actually really appreciate it when people fact-check bad conclusions and I am glad to have been corrected! :thumb:
This image was the one that conclusively sealed for me that the Ambassador lacked a ventral array:
I was very tempted for a few minutes!
I thought about it, but ultimately decided against it. The Ambassador has two very large shuttlebays rather than the single main bay seen on its predecessors and successors (with ancillary bays in the case of the Galaxy; I don't really know what that underside...bay-thing is on the Excelsior -- I've seen it referred to as cargo processing, the actual shuttlebay with the apparent shuttlebay actually a cargo loading bay, and so on). I imagine most of its support craft traffic is going to make use of these two bays and their attendant facilities rather than the travel pods.
Tonight, I am one area short of declaring the secondary hull done! Additions: two additional lifeboat pairs in the undercut/notch/whatever, cargo loading hatches, dorsal and ventral running lights along the center line, a housing for the shuttlebay maintenance facilities, emergency deuterium venting ports, hatches concealing the deuterium fueling ports, and bits along the spine.
All that remains (unless your eagle eyes spot something I've omitted) is the detailing around the secondary hull's shuttlebay (for which I'll be riffing on the detailing from the refit Constitution) and the doors themselves. Then it's on to the pylons!
(Side Note: I just realized that most of my images were huge, owing to being saved by Blender as 100% quality JPEGs with no optimization. I've run them all through Photoshop's Save For Web and they are all substantially less enormous now. This doesn't have any effect on the thumbnails that are embedded here in the thread, but rather the images you see when you click on the thumbnails.)
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Well, docking manouvers will require a better expertise.
One idea ocurred to me: Placing the rear torpedo launcher at the bottom of the cutout instead of itAâs "top", wonAât give her a better coverage for firing? IAâm not asking you to move it, itAâs just an idea. By other side, I think that one or two little turrets over the shuttlebay, like in the "A", would be welcome. Just a suggestion.
All other additions that you made, are looking perfect! :thumb:
Though I have toyed with the idea, I'm not quite comfortable with putting movie-era turrets on a ship otherwise outfitted with phaser arrays. I feel like phaser arrays represent a sea change in Starfleet's armament and once they started designing ships with them, they didn't mix the two types.
That said, I might put an array on either side of the shuttlebay...
Spent a bunch of time putting some greebles into the insets on either side of the stardrive shuttlebay, inspired by the detailing on the Constitution refit and, finally, started in on the doors.
(Ignore the weird jagged stepping along the middle of the image; that's more of that strange lighting artifact that doesn't seem to have any cause.)
Clamshell doors are hard! I think I finally came up with something I don't hate, though. What you see here isn't complete (which is why it looks so terrible!
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Finished up reshaping and rounding the edges on the door segments. Still need to add some detailing to them and the tracks they travel along.
In addition to the usual render, I decided to do a little animation test to see how they looked while opening. It's just an OpenGL render rather than a full Cycles render, since it didn't seem worth doing a full-quality render for a test animation.
Timing's roughly based on the door sequence from ST5, with each door segment taking three seconds to move into position over the neighboring segment and the all-segments opening sequence taking 12 seconds. The ST5 scene showed that the doors can be opened selectively, so you wouldn't necessarily need to open all four segments on each side to their full extension to admit a single shuttle. I imagine the full-wide opening is for high-traffic situations, as might be found when the ship is in drydock.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Argh, whyyyyy do you say these things?
I agree with you completely, actually. My original plan was to make them with straightened segments, just like the A...until I realized I'd modeled the cutout for curved doors! I thought, "Well, you can either re-do the details in those dark insets and reshape the cutout, or you can just make curved doors." The latter seemed easier.
Truth be told, the latter wasn't easier at all and they don't look nearly as good. What's more the C actually has A-like doors (though the Yamaguchi variant has more rounded doors)! :argh:
Sigh. Guess I'll go re-do that cutout. And the doors.
Jerk.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Ignore the pause between each segment. The ultimate plan is to stagger them a bit, so as one is slowing down/ending, the next one will be starting to move. It'll still give it a sort of wave of motion appearance, but it won't be so staggered, the way it does now.
Now I need to retool that detail inset... :argh:
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
That's what I'm here for...
New version looks tons better, BTW. :thumb:
At long last, I think the secondary hull is done! The doors now have sunken troughs to slide along, which give the doors a visual termination point. When I get around to texturing, I'll be adding little skid/wear marks along the paths each door takes to indicate use and such. Also mangled the detail inset so that it matches the new shape of the doors, and I also made it about six times as deep as it was, which makes those details a lot more visible now. Added some access panels (for emergency door opening, I suppose?) to the outermost bay door. Completely rebuilt the shuttlebay interior and interior/exterior hull transition point so that it's nice and smooth. Once again immensely grateful that someone wrote such a flexible Fillet add-on. A lot of this work would be significantly harder without it!
Next stop: detailing the nacelle pylons!
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Pylons done. Not a lot to say other than that.
Next up, finishing the nacelles. Then it's on to interiors.
Some stats, for those curious.
:argh:
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Oh, don't I know it.
And proper lighting.
:argh:
My checklist of remaining modeling tasks only has another 10 or so things on it (though two of those things are simply "upper/lower shuttlebay interior," so not all items are created equal). Then I have another dozen items for texturing and lighting, and over half of those are just "UV (name of part)." The actual texture work is just lumped into "paint hull diffuse texture" and "paint hull spec/normal textures." :rolleyes:
But that, at least, will be a gearshift from modeling!
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Spent some time with my old friends, the warp nacelles, this evening. Spent far too much time fooling around with the subsurface cages before finally freezing them, added in the Bussard field emitters (or whatever the orange bits are!), the insets on top of the nacelles, running lights, and refined the shape of the internal warp coils a bit.
Whole thing is just under a million polygons at present, with all its subsurfaces frozen and as optimized as I'm going to bother optimizing them.
There are a few bits of detailing left to do (including the RCS thrusters), I need to amp up the subdivisions on the warp field grilles in the back, and then do the internal plasma injector mechanism (which should also help how see-through the back of the nacelle is right now).
Then there are a few things to fix/add to the saucer...and it's on to interiors!
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
The nav lights placed over the naceles appears to be a bit small than it should be...
BTW, I notice the saucer has no impulse engines, but neither does the model. I guess the props department was in a rush when they made the model for yesterday's enterprise and figurted it didn't matter...:rolleyes:
I really like the way the coils are visible inside the nacelles, BTW, that's the best touch here.
I had the exact thought, but I can't figure out why they look so small; they're the exact same size as all of the other nav lights, yet they look tiny.
All hard modeled. The only image maps used anywhere right now are for the room interiors, and even those are slated for complete overhaul once I start texturing. None of the materials you see are anywhere near final, either. Only the glowing bits are anything other than single-color Diffuse BSDFs.
On the topic of materials, I'm planning (we'll see if this bears out) to do something fun with the hull material. In addition to the usual painted color map, I want to make the material itself subtly iridescent, throwing off greenish, purplish, or blueish fresnel bounce depending on the angle of view. This would couple with the spec/gloss map to try to achieve an effect similar to that of the original Enterprise refit model. If it works like I hope it will, it should turn out quite nice, especially when in motion. It could end up looking like crap, though. We shall see!
Yeah... :rolleyes: I suppose one could speculate that there's an impulse engine embedded inside the saucer where it joins the neck for emergency separation, but there's definitely no sign of one mounted on the exterior.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Remaining things to model:
And...that's it. Then, at long last, it's on to texturing.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Anyway, here are the now totally done nacelles, complete with ridiculous probably-never-to-be-actually-seen interior mechanisms!
Facing forward, showing the Bussard plasma feeds and primary injector assembly.
Facing aft, showing the nacelle operations room. May decide to add some more bits to that back wall, more or less mirroring the front wall and giving a conduit for the plasma stream to follow, but...meh?
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog