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3DU.S.S. Coronado, Katana Class Starship

1356

Posts

  • akb1979akb1979172 Posts: 0Member
    McC wrote: »
    "What's half the height of the hull panels?" "Uh....15.235cm?" "What's one third?" "Oh, piss off, I'll just use 30cm!"

    Laughed my ass off to this. :D

    Love this ship, she's a real beauty.
  • McCMcC373 Posts: 704Member
    edited June 2019 #63
    Thanks, akb1979!

    Decided I didn't like the existing module connector spars, so I deleted the old ones and rebuilt them. The new ones remain flush with the module hull until one "room" prior to the edge of the module. The outer edge now lines up with the proper thickness of a deck, too, and the dorsal and ventral flat surfaces also correctly coincide with decks.
    coro_2014-02-17-2154.jpg coro_2014-02-17-2055.jpg

    Then I made phasers. :D
    coro_2014-02-17-2253.jpg

    The inset area has a different material than the rest of the phaser structure, so I can fool about with the shader and make it "light up" as it prepares to fire.
    Post edited by McC on
    JES
  • evil_genius_180evil_genius_1804255 Posts: 11,034Member
    Are you sure they're not phaser guns? ;)

    Looking great. :)
  • AresiusAresius359 Posts: 4,171Member
    nice work, really love the detail.
  • McCMcC373 Posts: 704Member
    edited June 2019 #66
    Thanks, evil_genius_180 and Aresius!

    So, tonight's update has no discernible change (other than the addition of the dorsal phaser strip) from the previous, despite representing two evenings' worth of intensive work! First, the pretty renders:

    coro_2014-02-20-0110.jpg coro_2014-02-20-0105.jpg

    And now the technical explanation of WTF. It turns out that Cycles, in order to be faster, has a somewhat imprecise ray-to-triangle intersection algorithm. This manifested on Coro here in the form of the light from the interiors leaking through polygon seams! It wasn't too bad at high light levels, but in dark renders it looked terrible. On a hunch, I decided to see what would happen if I fully enclosed the room objects, giving them an interior wall (instead of making them more like open TV sets) with inward-facing normals to ray-intersect with the emitted light. Much to my relief, this actually worked like a charm! Of course, it was also a huge pain in the butt to vertex-snap all of the interior walls to the inside edge of the window inset, hence why it's taken me two evenings to do!

    Here's a before/after image with the exposure cranked way up.
    coro_2014-02-19-2222.jpg

    Let this be a lesson to any Blender folks out there who plan to put rooms behind their windows! :D
    Post edited by McC on
    JES
  • joededmanjoededman0 Posts: 0Member
    McC wrote: »
    Let this be a lesson to any Blender folks out there who plan to put rooms behind their windows! :D

    Noted. :) Great looking piece of machinery. Going to have to figure out how to get my copy of blender to do that.

    joe
  • Judge Death.Judge Death.1 Posts: 0Member
    Huh. I have the same damn problem on the hephaestus' main hull with light showing thry the hull in closeups. Thanks for letting me know WTF it was snf no mistake on my part.
  • Vortex5972Vortex5972320 Posts: 1,201Member
    Well, that'll be handy to know at some point, so thankyou. Awesome looking mesh.
  • McCMcC373 Posts: 704Member
    edited June 2019 #70
    Thanks, joededman, Judge Death., and Vortex5972!

    Back to work! :cool:

    coro_2014-07-31-2130.jpg
    Post edited by McC on
    JES
  • Vortex5972Vortex5972320 Posts: 1,201Member
    Whoa it's back!! Looking great as always.
  • McCMcC373 Posts: 704Member
    edited June 2019 #72
    Thanks, Vortex5972!

    Took a little break from hull modeling to make a Sovereign-style escape pod hatch/cover/top thing. I went ahead and textured it, too, just to get it all over and done with.

    coro_2014-08-02-2004.jpg
    coro_2014-08-02-2010.jpg

    The mesh for this object sits in its own layer and is the sole member of a Group called EPod. The ones in the the renders are actually just Empty objects that instance the EPod Group, so I can make changes to the single master (if necessary) and have it replicate out to every placed escape pod.

    I scaled them to be roughly the same size as those on the Sovereign: ~6.5m across and ~5.5m tall (assuming a 2248' length for the Sovereign, the John Eaves Nemesis blueprints being accurate, and my ensuing average measurement of 21.2' being correct!). I'll eventually add their random hatch numbers, same as I did for my Ambassador, but that's just a matter of goofing around with the shader rather than any actual texturing.
    Post edited by McC on
    JES
  • evil_genius_180evil_genius_1804255 Posts: 11,034Member
    Not everybody chooses to point out mesh errors in their work. ;)

    Nice work on the pod tops. For the Sovereign, they weren't hatches. They were just the tops of the pods, to make ILM's job easier. ;)
  • McCMcC373 Posts: 704Member
    edited June 2019 #74
    Not everybody chooses to point out mesh errors in their work. ;)
    Yeah, but I'd rather make it known that I've seen the problem and intend to address it than have a chorus of "You've got mesh errors!" ;)
    Nice work on the pod tops. For the Sovereign, they weren't hatches. They were just the tops of the pods, to make ILM's job easier. ;)
    All true; Eaves (I think it was Eaves, anyway) designed them to be hatches that popped open to reveal the actual pod, the same as it was (supposed to be) on the Galaxy and Intrepid, but pragmatism won out over design intention. In my case, they're really just facades. ;)

    coro_2014-08-05-2302.jpg

    Sensor submodule! I included the inset that I plagiar--*cough* used for inspiration from Sternbach's (not Eaves; thanks evil_genius_180 for pointing out my goof!) Voyager detail sketches. This is one of three submodules -- the first, which I've been using up until now, is the armor module (shown center); the second is the sensor module; the third and final is the transporter module...coming soon!

    I dunno what's happening in some of the darker areas where it goes all...fuzzy. I understand the sampling noise, but not the blurry fuzz. I suspect I've got a goofy material setting somewhere.
    Post edited by McC on
    JES
  • evil_genius_180evil_genius_1804255 Posts: 11,034Member
    Your sensor array looks nice. It's good to have consistency between ships. :)

    Yes, John Eaves designed a pop-off hatch system with the pod "behind" it. However, due to practical concerns, Alex Jaeger had to simplify the design. It makes more sense anyway, because John's hatches just flew off into space, which is kind of wasteful. ;) They always wanted to do an escape pod ejection sequence with the Enterprise-D, but it was never in the budget. However, we did finally get to see the Ent-D style pods at work in one of the later Voyager episodes.

    Rick Sternbach designed Voyager, so I don't see why John Eaves would have drawn a sensor array for it. Eaves was working on Generations at the time, which was in development simultaneously with Voyager. It's probably Sternbach's drawing.
  • jay-mojay-mo0 Posts: 0Member
    I can't say I'm a fan of this design, mainly the sectioned saucer. It's getting more interesting with all those nice details. Sensors look great.
  • McCMcC373 Posts: 704Member
    edited June 2019 #77
    Thanks, evil_genius_180 and jay-mo!
    Rick Sternbach designed Voyager, so I don't see why John Eaves would have drawn a sensor array for it. Eaves was working on Generations at the time, which was in development simultaneously with Voyager. It's probably Sternbach's drawing.
    Because I'm a dummy, that's why. :D

    Two of my main detail references for this model are Sovereign and Intrepid. I got so brain-locked on talking about Sovereign stuff (i.e. Eaves's work) that I started thinking they were both Eaves's work. Which is really dumb, because in that little inset in my previous post, the image is signed by Sternbach.

    Moving onto the connector spars, here's the RCS thruster module that sits on each of the horizontal +/-30 degree spars.
    coro_2014-08-10-1529.jpg
    Post edited by McC on
    JES
  • wibblewibble1120 Weimar, GermanyPosts: 488Member
    Hey this is looking really cool. Usually there isn't much to these yellow TNG (and post TNG) RCS Modules, but yours really pops out.
  • SchimpfySchimpfy396 Posts: 1,632Member
    That looks great. It would really pop if the grills would be black or some other contrasting color. :)
  • McCMcC373 Posts: 704Member
    edited June 2019 #80
    Thanks, wibble and Schimpfy!
    Schimpfy wrote: »
    It would really pop if the grills would be black or some other contrasting color. :)
    Yep, that's the plan! Right now, all of the stuff you see (except for the escape pods) is entirely untextured, so things are just single-color shaded. (Even the warp nacelles aren't really textured; that's all procedural stuff.)

    This update is going to seem really trivial, but it's a big deal to me because of what it represents rather than what it is:
    coro_2014-08-10-1719.jpg

    "You put a registry on it. So what?"

    On my Ambassador, I did a bunch of whacky shader tricks to exploit Blender's "Generated" bounding box texture projection vector (distinct from UV maps) to project, position, and scale all of the various signage and registry textures. I took advantage of normal facing to isolate textures in some cases. In general, it worked fine, but it resulted in ugly node setups like this:

    nodes_Hull.Pylons.jpg

    This time, though, I stumbled across a way to do it much more simply. Here's a quick breakdown:

    coro_2014-08-10-1719_detail.jpg

    The fun part is that all of this stuff has always been in Blender, I just never knew about it. This should make registry text a lot easier going forward! :D
    Post edited by McC on
    JES
  • evil_genius_180evil_genius_1804255 Posts: 11,034Member
    I really like the RCS thrusters. :)
  • McCMcC373 Posts: 704Member
    edited June 2019 #82
    Thanks, evil_genius_180!

    I have mixed feelings about these two renders, because I can see a bunch of mesh errors that I really need to fix and there's a ton of light sampling noise, but there's something about them that I really enjoy anyway.
    coro_2014-08-13-0040.jpg
    coro_2014-08-13-0051.jpg
    Post edited by McC on
    JES
  • jay-mojay-mo0 Posts: 0Member
    I'm not sure if it is viewing angle or what you did with the geometry between the sections of the saucer, but it is looking more appealing to me. The sections look less noticeable which is what was bothering me about this design. From these angles it's starting to work. Nice interiors and shuttle pod dock.
  • Vortex5972Vortex5972320 Posts: 1,201Member
    I think the surface finish and depth given in the windows really sell those renders. The segmentation also seems a lot subtler, which I like.
  • McCMcC373 Posts: 704Member
    edited June 2019 #85
    Thanks, jay-mo and Vortex5972!

    I spent most of last night adding windows and rooms to deck two...only to realize that I had done so in the Ambassador/Galaxy style rather than the later Sovereign/Intrepid style I've been using. I got halfway through a render before I realized the incongruity. :argh:

    So! Redid that, dropped in some more escape pods, and added a bit of greebling leading to the upper shuttlebay.
    coro_2014-08-14-2105.jpg
    coro_2014-08-14-2155.jpg
    Post edited by McC on
    JES
  • Vortex5972Vortex5972320 Posts: 1,201Member
    I bet that wasn't annoying at all. I really like your windows. Are the 3D? They look like the have thickness to them.
  • McCMcC373 Posts: 704Member
    edited June 2019 #87
    Vortex5972 wrote: »
    I bet that wasn't annoying at all. I really like your windows. Are the 3D? They look like the have thickness to them.
    Thanks! Yep, they're 3D. About 30cm inset from the hull, along with two panes of glass (one facing out, one facing in). Beyond them are some very primitive boxes to serve as the rooms, which are basically glorified unwrapped cubes that have a self-illuminating shader applied to them. Click on this guy for an interior, OpenGL view of one of the rooms:
    coro_2014-02-20-0801_ogl.jpg

    Added some raised paneling to the cobra head/cape area, which of course you can't see at all due to its current uniform color. My increasing frustration with the "sameness" of the surface, when the final texture is intended to be so varied, got the best of me and I decided to pause modeling for a bit and bring the UVs up to snuff so I could at least slap some color on the model. I managed to get through most of the module UVs this weekend. The submodules still need to be done, which is why they're still the original metallic gray rather than the darker color on the outer and inner bands.

    coro_2014-08-16-1700.jpg
    coro_2014-08-17-1759.jpg

    I'm also somewhat perplexed why the outer band and the inner flat area of the saucer appear to be so different -- they're the exact same color in the texture. The roof of deck two is even darker and yet it doesn't show at all. Probably something to do with the way the Glossy shader is adding to the Diffuse.
    Post edited by McC on
    JES
  • evil_genius_180evil_genius_1804255 Posts: 11,034Member
    It's looking good. :thumb:
    McC wrote: »
    I'm also somewhat perplexed why the outer band and the inner flat area of the saucer appear to be so different -- they're the exact same color in the texture. The roof of deck two is even darker and yet it doesn't show at all. Probably something to do with the way the Glossy shader is adding to the Diffuse.

    It has to do with your specular setting, the position of the light and the way the light is hitting the model. The light isn't hitting the flat surface at the same angle as it is the curved parts, so you're getting less of a specular highlight. The outer band is curved down and away from the light so much that not much of the light is hitting it, so it appears a lot darker with the light behind the model like that. This kind of thing happens in CGI, probably more so than it does with real models and lights. Real models and lights are also done in rooms, where you'll always have walls to bounce light back onto the model. You don't get that with CGI, unless you create a "room" and do a really long radiosity render, or something similar.
  • McCMcC373 Posts: 704Member
    It's looking good. :thumb:
    Thanks!
    It has to do with your specular setting, the position of the light and the way the light is hitting the model. The light isn't hitting the flat surface at the same angle as it is the curved parts, so you're getting less of a specular highlight. The outer band is curved down and away from the light so much that not much of the light is hitting it, so it appears a lot darker with the light behind the model like that. This kind of thing happens in CGI, probably more so than it does with real models and lights. Real models and lights are also done in rooms, where you'll always have walls to bounce light back onto the model. You don't get that with CGI, unless you create a "room" and do a really long radiosity render, or something similar.
    I do know how CG lights and specular reflections work, thanks. ;)

    My confusion comes from the degree of disparity; the outer rim looks about as dark as I would expect based on the color in the texture itself, and is pretty consistent all the way around accounting for the edges facing more toward the light on the far edge of the saucer. While it's possible that it's just the checker shadow illusion coupled with the gloss highlight, those color values in the render are a lot darker on the rim than the ones on the top surface. That's why I suspect it has something to do with the shader mixing going on.
  • evil_genius_180evil_genius_1804255 Posts: 11,034Member
    McC wrote: »
    I do know how CG lights and specular reflections work, thanks. ;)

    If you don't want an answer, don't ask the question. :p
    McC wrote: »
    My confusion comes from the degree of disparity; the outer rim looks about as dark as I would expect based on the color in the texture itself, and is pretty consistent all the way around accounting for the edges facing more toward the light on the far edge of the saucer. While it's possible that it's just the checker shadow illusion coupled with the gloss highlight, those color values in the render are a lot darker on the rim than the ones on the top surface. That's why I suspect it has something to do with the shader mixing going on.

    Like I said, this kind of stuff happens in CGI. I get weird things like this from time to time, and I don't know why. It doesn't seem to matter which 3D software you're using, it happens in a lot of them. (I stopped short of saying "all of them" because I can't say that for certain. ;)) I've been saying for years that lights are one area where CGI is still behind and this is a great example of why.
  • Vortex5972Vortex5972320 Posts: 1,201Member
    That room needs more doors. :p

    Thanks for the look in, interesting to see such things. I was wondering whether you'd used thicken on the glass. Two panes seems to do the trick nicely.
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