Yeah www.madfishway.rr.nu is the tut url some are on the blog since I had to move hosts. (reason I use the redirects) My current works are in Mental Ray the lighting tut there is for scanline if I remember.
Currently I have 2 MR omnis one key one fill both set to a dark blue for shadow and set to raytrace shadows. Further down the roll out is a setting for dia (set either to rectangle or circle) This allows you to adjust the size of the emitter larger it is the softer the shadow edges.
I have a single skylight for diffuse and Final gather turned on. AA is set to tri and whatever value it is default. Bounce is set to 2.
The important thing in this set up is not the rigging of lights or setting up the photon stuff it is the materials and environment. That backdrop I use is set up as a environment for the scene so it affects reflection and light. Also as clearly seen on the ground plane images just that flat dish shaped floor really affects the ship itself. All this tied with subtle things like noise in the gloss slots and diffuse of various colours help break up the materials.
I have a tut on how to set up a environmental map and it also lets you add CAG elements to photos (the original intent of the tut) Just placing a Backdrop image in the environment slot would work though.
Oh very cool! Thank you for sharing your techniques. I have Max 2013 so I should be able to translate your tutorial.
I had a feeling that my materials were affecting the rendering as well; my renders currently look like photographs of plastic models.
Anyway, once again you renders look great.
Back on this since I was unmotivated to work on my 2d stuff.
Started out the rcs packs. I am not sure if the final elements will be thruster based like the NX or some early impulse or whatever they are in TOS/TMP. Reaction thrust like compressed gasses or burning of volatiles would likely give stronger thrust than any electro magnetic whatever in this era. But who knows when impulse or other plasma based thrusters were developed. Seemed like only earth designs used this older method in the ENT era, unless it was a lower tech race.
I like this! Especially the 'afterburner' type impulse vents. Could it be a new 'high impulse' prototype?
I was thinking of some cool names for this too, so here they are listed in order of personal preference;
USS Bellerophon (she just looks like a Bellerophon...
USS Concordia
USS Resilient
USS Tomahawk
USS San Antonio
USS Colarado
USS Dallas
USS Dakota
USS El Salvador
USS Endurance
USS Fearless
USS Daring
USS Belligerent
USS Arkansas
USS Argonaut
USS Heracles
USS Tobias
USS Axon
USS Archangel
Render of the rcs thingies on the ship. Ignore the colors since it is just to help me define what bits or what and easy selection of surfaces. Also a collection of images that are as close as I will come to orthos ever. These are for ref and possibly for those wanting to do msd or whatever. They are not for reprinting for RPGs or whatever. I still do not see the need for orthos unless it is to produce msd or copycat the model for a game etc.
The side view is with plain decks laid out KIM not all decks run the full length and level with other decks within a given plane of the ship. I ALWAYS build my ships on a non linear deck plan. This is like how real ships are built where decks have to go around "stuff" Plan is there are only 2 half decks and most of these access decks are between walls or other deck heights. Say for example the inner grouping of "rooms" after the rim rooms are half a deck up or 1/4 a deck up with smaller crawlspace decks accessing mechanicals and whatnot. The deck grid is correct and centered to the rim rooms. Bridge entrance from the aft rooms is level to the turbo shafts but the outer control stations are sunken down with the command location nav and pilot level with the entrance. Out side of these settings I have not located the engineering departments nor mapped out cargo or shuttle bay specifics. I think the warp coil layout I have used is the symmetrical design. The coils exposed on the inner side vs a symmetrical visual layout which I think is 2 sets of coils back to back. I am not 100% sure what they mean in tech call outs for the NX class.
The impulse is mainly for ramp up to max speed, think of torque in a car. Or chemical propellant vs ion drive. Both can be fast but one gets to max much faster than the other. I watched TMP the other day and it was refreshed how it was inferred that the impulse engines were used to ramp the ship into warp. This could though be because of the "untested" systems. shrug. I cannot speculate much more until I decide if this is my own uni design or something speculative in the primary uni. Explanations would change depending on the choice. EXP given that novels and some other content leads to the Romulan Earth war only taking 4 to 6 years and the gearing up of NX class ships as the main force. I always saw the Earth Rom Wars as taking place over a few decades with many ships involved over that period with a few large fleet show downs. Granted I have not read any of the novels and not likely to. If I were to place this in my own universe I would place the earth rom war post the formation of the federation or push dates to allow for the NX class to retire during the war or to be replaced with smaller cheaper faster to build ships.
I am not soliciting names for the ship. I left it blank since it is a stage I find the least important to the process of design. Only inconvenience is modeling the name and registry onto the hull and planning lighting by not having chosen a name early on. I can definitely say I will not reuse any known canon name unless by not knowing. SO no Defiants Columbias etc. I do like to pick names with some meaning behind them. Often why I use names from history and never from modern history. That or it is related to the mission, times, or story related to the ship.
In the end think of this thing as a bulked up beefier cheaper ship. The mass produced truck to the coach built racer.
OK crap wall of text. Probably full of grammatical errors etc but Im not rereading it hahaha. But hopefully this will whet the appetites for neckbeard level info.
Mucking with the docking collar not sure if this will be a asymmetrical feature or not. But sorta dawned on me that I am screwing this up since the ring on the NX was round. (stopped the render and replaced bits of crap) Starting to think the last week or more of work should be reverted to scale thing a bit differently such as the largish looking rcs housings etc.
Also KIM this is just rough in the door for example would be set in further and what not as I worked in more details.
Anyone have any static measurements for things? No counting pixels crap but flat out measured blueprints etc? Starting to wonder if my door height is just way off making everything else requiring more bulk than it should.
Ok decided to rework that hatch. A bit more up to par. Only thing is size and scale is a bit wonk and I am not going to remodel the saucer rim to accommodate the proper ring dai. Least what I measure it as given the door with malcom next to it shows it is about 5'11" to 6' or so high. If I remember he is short, so maybe less than my guesstimates. It is a interior door of the airlock but the only ref with actor or reference-able object I could find.
I think this is one of those "man hole" locks that are scattered about the ship.
I guess I coulda recut the entire inset and had at it again and really should to tuck the whole thing in some to allow over hang but BAH It is just something likely to be only 10pixels high in any given render anyhow! FFFff
Oh well heh
I will need to update other hatchways with this new door/hatch luckily I have only done one other so far on the ship. Not sure how many others I will on the ships hull. Still debating if this feature will be a symmetrical detail or not.
Nice blend of both eras.
And it makes more sense to have at least the unnecessary parts of the thruster assembly covered by plating (e.g., space shuttle orbiter) than to leave everything exposed to external dangers (e.g., NX-01).
The NX bits are a bit more complex since they are inset into a shell? I was just too lazy to want to cut all those thruster nozzles and chamfer the cuts out to create rings and adjoin all those various tilted bits so I cut in grooves and inset the buggers. If I had the patience I would cut them into the hull to look more like the STA thruster packs, as is the cones I made look sickeningly like little radar dishes. Maybe I might redo them yet again and do something coned interior but not on the exterior? Eh shrug.
Started looking at where the hell else I could put docking rings, the space on the engineering repair deck and shuttle bay is way too narrow and feasibly not that secure if the docked vehicle goes hostile. But I guess the same could be said for the collar in this location of the NX as well as the one on the mixer dome box thing between the nacelles. (nx junk)
So I am looking at locating them off the venty things below the fairings. I thought about putting them on the fairings but to get them back far enough they would be awfully close to the impulse machinery and all the crap heading towards the struts etc. Where I stuck them were to be direct core flush vents so I can sorta fudge them in here by widening those bits and making them more structural and only having a portion work as the original venting system. Much of the structure is temp in regards to the rings. I would assume smaller ships could dock here and share the warp field or whatnot. There are call outs on some blueprints for collars in a similar location on the NX. I am considering putting massive heatsinks here as well. This whole area of the ship is a nightmare though. Just bodging about and no real design work just plopping crap as I see it in my head.
With all this said I think the saucer rings are going to be against my wants a symmetrical feature since I cannot just leave the ship with one collar for all large connections.
The thing that gets me is finding room for these things on the ship My model is only 197.5m vs 225m of the NX, where with that ship the saucer rim works out as well as a lot of areas that are impossible for me to get it in. Maybe it is a scale thing I have the egress too high and dai of the collar itself is too large or something. Ok, added a render of my little ship next to Kenny's NX-01. I guess that extra length just adds that much more girth to the ship. (yes the textures are all whack they keep sourcing crap with similar names in my random 3d folder)
Small update to the belly. Redid those fairings or whatever and added a shroudish thing around the collar. I will obviously have to rework things a bit here to look better and I think the shroud could be changed up some to better fit in and provide some additional services like maybe umbilical jacks etc. I think the idea of any plasma vention here will have to be tossed out since well Not sure if I want guests coming in with plasma flush conduits on the other side of the hallways. Things are tight in this area and well there are places where it is just that. Major systems trunk lines running alongside passageways. Just cannot be helped.
As well too offset the loss of the asymmetrical docking collar I am considering going with the asymmetrical cargo bay in the upper and lower saucer. This is if I can weave the interior bits to work with it.
Note there will be an attachment purge soon, you have been warned.
Ohhh I hate text. heh Guess I coulda went through the trouble of creating it in texture then using tricks to apply it but ehhh too many textures to sort out already.
Huge render and I got a turned edge too! behh. Final image shows some sensors in the lab pie, least one of them for now. I also stuck some of the sensor crap into those arms. Not sure on those yet. Likely I will cut up those brackets some to appear to telescope or do something other than look like huge bulkheads.
Really not sure how much will get done on this this weekend.
Separate post for the shader crap, adding this since it was asked for sorta. It should get you into the ballpark I would up the sample rate on the glossy settings from the 20 I have in the screen caps to say 90 or so depending how close you will get to the hull. NOW one drawback in how this all works is any lights as materials on the ship (lum) will create horrible grain so you will have to up the I think FG points to eliminate it fully. I am running max 2010 so newer mental ray might have corrected this or have some cheat setting IE multiplier to blur out the grain some. Good place to see how it affects glossy materials is on the impulse engines the housing is flatter so it is a smoother result.
Oh also be aware of hotspots if you use the glare shader in the mental ray camera, it will blow out this shader easily. Sadly I have not found a easy way to key it to only specific things. Maybe there is a combo of things you can do to key it via material ID or some crap to isolate the ship glows and lights from the render pass without having to render a completely separate pass. Anyhow that is up you the user to rig and decide HAH.
Thanks for sharing!
Any chance you could also add this image on your tutorial index for easier future reference?
It's a nice touch that you decided to keep the TOS hull font for hull labels instead of Microgramma from all eras beyond TOS.
Also have to agree on the platform in front of the shuttle bay. In-universe, in the context of a hard to control damaged shuttle, the pilot would have a better chance of survival if he crashed on that platform and kinda slid into the bay than to just outright risk slamming into some tight door's edges.
What little time I had was spent prepping things and figuring out how I will approach the ideas I had originally for this outer hull area. Hopefully I can get it to work. The tan rim is the most obtrusive area atm and something I have winged whinge? (s/p) on for a while. Should it stay should it go etc. ATM I plan to cut right across this surface so the outer saucer will be huge pie sections that pull away from the hull when work is needed to be done. Will it work? I dunno.
Not really what I had in mind but I think this works. Going to redo it all so it is a bit tighter than this, it just looks to awkward to have the variation in width.
Posts
Currently I have 2 MR omnis one key one fill both set to a dark blue for shadow and set to raytrace shadows. Further down the roll out is a setting for dia (set either to rectangle or circle) This allows you to adjust the size of the emitter larger it is the softer the shadow edges.
I have a single skylight for diffuse and Final gather turned on. AA is set to tri and whatever value it is default. Bounce is set to 2.
The important thing in this set up is not the rigging of lights or setting up the photon stuff it is the materials and environment. That backdrop I use is set up as a environment for the scene so it affects reflection and light. Also as clearly seen on the ground plane images just that flat dish shaped floor really affects the ship itself. All this tied with subtle things like noise in the gloss slots and diffuse of various colours help break up the materials.
I have a tut on how to set up a environmental map and it also lets you add CAG elements to photos (the original intent of the tut) Just placing a Backdrop image in the environment slot would work though.
http://madkoifish.wordpress.com/2011/02/25/3dsmax-compositing-with-a-photo-in-app/
Mmm it is done in max2010, had someone ask about maxv9 so it might not exist in older versions.
Those sipes tails etc off the pylons were though of as magnetic pylons to control or shape the plasma exhaust.
-MKF
I had a feeling that my materials were affecting the rendering as well; my renders currently look like photographs of plastic models.
Anyway, once again you renders look great.
Started out the rcs packs. I am not sure if the final elements will be thruster based like the NX or some early impulse or whatever they are in TOS/TMP. Reaction thrust like compressed gasses or burning of volatiles would likely give stronger thrust than any electro magnetic whatever in this era. But who knows when impulse or other plasma based thrusters were developed. Seemed like only earth designs used this older method in the ENT era, unless it was a lower tech race.
I was thinking of some cool names for this too, so here they are listed in order of personal preference;
USS Bellerophon (she just looks like a Bellerophon...
USS Concordia
USS Resilient
USS Tomahawk
USS San Antonio
USS Colarado
USS Dallas
USS Dakota
USS El Salvador
USS Endurance
USS Fearless
USS Daring
USS Belligerent
USS Arkansas
USS Argonaut
USS Heracles
USS Tobias
USS Axon
USS Archangel
The side view is with plain decks laid out KIM not all decks run the full length and level with other decks within a given plane of the ship. I ALWAYS build my ships on a non linear deck plan. This is like how real ships are built where decks have to go around "stuff" Plan is there are only 2 half decks and most of these access decks are between walls or other deck heights. Say for example the inner grouping of "rooms" after the rim rooms are half a deck up or 1/4 a deck up with smaller crawlspace decks accessing mechanicals and whatnot. The deck grid is correct and centered to the rim rooms. Bridge entrance from the aft rooms is level to the turbo shafts but the outer control stations are sunken down with the command location nav and pilot level with the entrance. Out side of these settings I have not located the engineering departments nor mapped out cargo or shuttle bay specifics. I think the warp coil layout I have used is the symmetrical design. The coils exposed on the inner side vs a symmetrical visual layout which I think is 2 sets of coils back to back. I am not 100% sure what they mean in tech call outs for the NX class.
The impulse is mainly for ramp up to max speed, think of torque in a car. Or chemical propellant vs ion drive. Both can be fast but one gets to max much faster than the other. I watched TMP the other day and it was refreshed how it was inferred that the impulse engines were used to ramp the ship into warp. This could though be because of the "untested" systems. shrug. I cannot speculate much more until I decide if this is my own uni design or something speculative in the primary uni. Explanations would change depending on the choice. EXP given that novels and some other content leads to the Romulan Earth war only taking 4 to 6 years and the gearing up of NX class ships as the main force. I always saw the Earth Rom Wars as taking place over a few decades with many ships involved over that period with a few large fleet show downs. Granted I have not read any of the novels and not likely to. If I were to place this in my own universe I would place the earth rom war post the formation of the federation or push dates to allow for the NX class to retire during the war or to be replaced with smaller cheaper faster to build ships.
I am not soliciting names for the ship. I left it blank since it is a stage I find the least important to the process of design. Only inconvenience is modeling the name and registry onto the hull and planning lighting by not having chosen a name early on. I can definitely say I will not reuse any known canon name unless by not knowing. SO no Defiants Columbias etc. I do like to pick names with some meaning behind them. Often why I use names from history and never from modern history. That or it is related to the mission, times, or story related to the ship.
In the end think of this thing as a bulked up beefier cheaper ship. The mass produced truck to the coach built racer.
OK crap wall of text. Probably full of grammatical errors etc but Im not rereading it hahaha. But hopefully this will whet the appetites for neckbeard level info.
Also KIM this is just rough in the door for example would be set in further and what not as I worked in more details.
Anyone have any static measurements for things? No counting pixels crap but flat out measured blueprints etc? Starting to wonder if my door height is just way off making everything else requiring more bulk than it should.
http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100124210846/memoryalpha/en/images/a/a2/Airlock_NX-01.jpg
I think this is one of those "man hole" locks that are scattered about the ship.
I guess I coulda recut the entire inset and had at it again and really should to tuck the whole thing in some to allow over hang but BAH It is just something likely to be only 10pixels high in any given render anyhow! FFFff
Oh well heh
I will need to update other hatchways with this new door/hatch luckily I have only done one other so far on the ship. Not sure how many others I will on the ships hull. Still debating if this feature will be a symmetrical detail or not.
And it makes more sense to have at least the unnecessary parts of the thruster assembly covered by plating (e.g., space shuttle orbiter) than to leave everything exposed to external dangers (e.g., NX-01).
Started looking at where the hell else I could put docking rings, the space on the engineering repair deck and shuttle bay is way too narrow and feasibly not that secure if the docked vehicle goes hostile. But I guess the same could be said for the collar in this location of the NX as well as the one on the mixer dome box thing between the nacelles. (nx junk)
So I am looking at locating them off the venty things below the fairings. I thought about putting them on the fairings but to get them back far enough they would be awfully close to the impulse machinery and all the crap heading towards the struts etc. Where I stuck them were to be direct core flush vents so I can sorta fudge them in here by widening those bits and making them more structural and only having a portion work as the original venting system. Much of the structure is temp in regards to the rings. I would assume smaller ships could dock here and share the warp field or whatnot. There are call outs on some blueprints for collars in a similar location on the NX. I am considering putting massive heatsinks here as well. This whole area of the ship is a nightmare though. Just bodging about and no real design work just plopping crap as I see it in my head.
With all this said I think the saucer rings are going to be against my wants a symmetrical feature since I cannot just leave the ship with one collar for all large connections.
The thing that gets me is finding room for these things on the ship My model is only 197.5m vs 225m of the NX, where with that ship the saucer rim works out as well as a lot of areas that are impossible for me to get it in. Maybe it is a scale thing I have the egress too high and dai of the collar itself is too large or something. Ok, added a render of my little ship next to Kenny's NX-01. I guess that extra length just adds that much more girth to the ship. (yes the textures are all whack they keep sourcing crap with similar names in my random 3d folder)
As well too offset the loss of the asymmetrical docking collar I am considering going with the asymmetrical cargo bay in the upper and lower saucer. This is if I can weave the interior bits to work with it.
Note there will be an attachment purge soon, you have been warned.
Huge render and I got a turned edge too! behh. Final image shows some sensors in the lab pie, least one of them for now. I also stuck some of the sensor crap into those arms. Not sure on those yet. Likely I will cut up those brackets some to appear to telescope or do something other than look like huge bulkheads.
Really not sure how much will get done on this this weekend.
Oh also be aware of hotspots if you use the glare shader in the mental ray camera, it will blow out this shader easily. Sadly I have not found a easy way to key it to only specific things. Maybe there is a combo of things you can do to key it via material ID or some crap to isolate the ship glows and lights from the render pass without having to render a completely separate pass. Anyhow that is up you the user to rig and decide HAH.
Any chance you could also add this image on your tutorial index for easier future reference?
It's a nice touch that you decided to keep the TOS hull font for hull labels instead of Microgramma from all eras beyond TOS.
Also have to agree on the platform in front of the shuttle bay. In-universe, in the context of a hard to control damaged shuttle, the pilot would have a better chance of survival if he crashed on that platform and kinda slid into the bay than to just outright risk slamming into some tight door's edges.