It looked okay on one station, but across them all, too many. Even reduced, most of the panels will have the same configuration for maintenance redundancy and crew familiarization. If a station is inoperable, in whole or in part, another station can be used by selecting a preprogrammed mode of operation. The science and the engineering stations are probably the only two that will have unique panels, but those two could also be controlled from another station with degraded capability. I noticed on the blueprint website I linked previously, there are two navigation stations, one conn and one perimeter. I don't think an extra navigation station is needed all the time and perhaps it should be an Auxiliary station instead that can be configured for mission specific duties.
The current era Hyperion is a departure from what STO is doing, or what is being done in the Pocket novels. I was researching the USS Titan under Riker and learned the design for the Luna class was determined through a contest. I congratulate the winner, but not the judges, because I donAât see a Sovereign/Akira kitbash as original in thinking, or moving the concepts of Star Trek vessels forward. I think it is playing it safe with what consumers will accept because it fits in with the other design styles of the era.
I agree more with and understand the Jefferies philosophy of design, the clean, smooth lines that we associate with sleekness and speed. And I think that as technology advances, we do more with less, so starships should be decreasing in size and crew compliment while being more powerful than predecessors. I look at some of the behemoths on STO and think AâYouAâre making space stations with warp drive.Aâ At some point the designs look more foolish than cool. And while I can copy Sternbach, Probert, and Eaves, itAâs not something I want to do.
And IAâm using the new Hyperion and the Ophion from an later post here in a story IAâm pecking out, so IAâll have something in the writerAâs forum later on.
Ha, I noticed I totally forgot the conn. It would be in the center as normal.
Security concerns are the rational behind the design. The CO can see all the displays from the back of the room, and each station operator can see the main viewer. The viewer cameras cannot see the stations, and there is no display behind the CO. With the turbolifts in the front, anyone entering the bridge is clearly visible.
Removed some buttons, not that it is much noticeable, and worked on the aft door. It took over an hour to render that (with 4 CPU threads on this laptop), so there wont be a lot of renders per post, or I'll render with one light only.
It's really starting to look the part now. Great job. I understand your not wanting to have rails, but how about some Defiant esque panels either side of the centre seat? Maybe not as big. It looks kind of naked there at the minute, for lack of a better term.
Testing out a lit ceiling dome that I'm not too sure about. Might need a band of non-emitting material to break it up. Lt. Cyrus almost sat in the chair before getting caught. Bad Girl! BAD BAD BAD!
Whatthehell, why not rails. Maybe some not so damn large, though.
And what do you, faster render times with only two light sources.
Internal. I tried Cycles, but I'm using a laptop without a dedicated GPU, so I don't have CPU/GPU options, just a generic Supported or Experimental. So I get a lot of noise. I've watched one cycles tut for texturing in nodes, which I pretty much understand.
I figured it was Internal due to the lighting. I gave Blender another look last week and I really love the Cycles render engine. Applying materials isn't bad, but I was having issues with UV mapping in Cycles. Unlike Internal, it doesn't have cube, sphere, plane and cylinder mapping, it forces you to unwrap. But, that was the only thing I didn't like. Otherwise, it's a fantastic rendering engine. I really love how it does global illumination. In that area, I feel your renders would be improved by using it. My GPU doesn't support that option either, but I have a great CPU, so it rendered pretty fast with the samples turned up.
I do most of computer work on my laptop, and since my wife got her own laptop recently, that freed up the desktop to become my son's Minecraft gaming station. Lucky for me, the graphics card needed replacing so I got one that does CUDA (whatever that may be) and I will have to test out the model rendering in Cycles on that machine. Until then...
Playing around with colors, and took off some reflection in hopes of speeding up the render. I don't think it worked. Been trying to find a color to replace the wood trim, and nothing other than TOS red seemed to look good. Here I'm making the chairs and the railing match, and I went back to the wood paneling. I think the rail padding would look alright with a vinyl texture. It kind of screams out for one. Had second thoughts about the glass done thing on the helm station and got rid of it.
The modeling had moved on from the challenging "Hmm, how an I going to do this" phase to the tedium of simple geometric details like status panels and dedication plaques which I'm not excited about doing.
Taking a break from the bridge. Some work on the nacelles.
The bussard cap spinner was a lot easier to make than I expected. But I did not expect to spend two nights worth of work playing with material and lighting values until I got something close. I do not like the warp grill, but I know what I want to do with it.
Manga Studio's tone patterns make grill textures easy to make. Drop a tone into the image, adjust it's parameters, and you are good to go. I had an alpha channel set wrong in the first image.
When I get this thing finished, I'll start playing around with Cycles.
Paint (or any such "simple" drawing program) is the worst choice for this kind of work, in my opinion. I prefer vector graphics, which makes life so much easier. There are some really nice open source VG programs out there. Inkscape is my personal choice for making textures. Then I take them into GIMP for adding stuff like weathering.
I was making a simple matrix of small black squares, which is perfect for MSPaint.
I added some details inside the cap and got tired of the trial and error rendering process of finding that pefect--no! acceptable--balance between transparency, surface emission, and unwanted shadows generated by the internal point lamp and projected on the inner surface of the cap. My internal details will have to be set to not cast shadows. Cycles should make light rendering a bit easier, I think. I've been playing with Blender all last year on an imported mesh, so I know my around around nodes, but at the moment I don't want devote a lot of time to fine tuning the cycles parameters to rid myself of much of the noise. At the moment, my interal renderer outputs a better looking image.
I've come to embrace the noise with Cycles as the more natural lighting makes a worthwhile tradeoff for me really seeing the shapes and how light interacts with geometry. Probably makes my renders frustrating for you guys, but I figure I'll track down the fireflies after I get the angles all nice. Grills are looking great!
That's probably enough red-tipped internal detail so I'll stop before I fractalsponge the hell out of it. Will probably add some lights to increase my ray building render time. Had to turn off the shadow casting on the red-tipped details--you don't need to see what it looked like.
Thought the background was too dark.
Added some reflection.
Then brighter sun lamp and AO.
Turned on the ship lights for a sunset shot. Don't ask--just got carried away.
Posts
The current era Hyperion is a departure from what STO is doing, or what is being done in the Pocket novels. I was researching the USS Titan under Riker and learned the design for the Luna class was determined through a contest. I congratulate the winner, but not the judges, because I donAât see a Sovereign/Akira kitbash as original in thinking, or moving the concepts of Star Trek vessels forward. I think it is playing it safe with what consumers will accept because it fits in with the other design styles of the era.
I agree more with and understand the Jefferies philosophy of design, the clean, smooth lines that we associate with sleekness and speed. And I think that as technology advances, we do more with less, so starships should be decreasing in size and crew compliment while being more powerful than predecessors. I look at some of the behemoths on STO and think AâYouAâre making space stations with warp drive.Aâ At some point the designs look more foolish than cool. And while I can copy Sternbach, Probert, and Eaves, itAâs not something I want to do.
And IAâm using the new Hyperion and the Ophion from an later post here in a story IAâm pecking out, so IAâll have something in the writerAâs forum later on.
EDIT: To clarify, I meant the model being built at the minute and not the sketch.
Security concerns are the rational behind the design. The CO can see all the displays from the back of the room, and each station operator can see the main viewer. The viewer cameras cannot see the stations, and there is no display behind the CO. With the turbolifts in the front, anyone entering the bridge is clearly visible.
Removed some buttons, not that it is much noticeable, and worked on the aft door. It took over an hour to render that (with 4 CPU threads on this laptop), so there wont be a lot of renders per post, or I'll render with one light only.
Testing out a lit ceiling dome that I'm not too sure about. Might need a band of non-emitting material to break it up. Lt. Cyrus almost sat in the chair before getting caught. Bad Girl! BAD BAD BAD!
Whatthehell, why not rails. Maybe some not so damn large, though.
And what do you, faster render times with only two light sources.
That's a little better.
Then I discovered a mesh error in the chair bases.
Does it ever end?
Anyway, I'm liking the bridge so far.
Playing around with colors, and took off some reflection in hopes of speeding up the render. I don't think it worked. Been trying to find a color to replace the wood trim, and nothing other than TOS red seemed to look good. Here I'm making the chairs and the railing match, and I went back to the wood paneling. I think the rail padding would look alright with a vinyl texture. It kind of screams out for one. Had second thoughts about the glass done thing on the helm station and got rid of it.
A little bit of work on the helm stations.
I'd love to know what happened to my reply to your post on the 28th. I guess the forum ate it. :rolleyes:
The modeling had moved on from the challenging "Hmm, how an I going to do this" phase to the tedium of simple geometric details like status panels and dedication plaques which I'm not excited about doing.
The bussard cap spinner was a lot easier to make than I expected. But I did not expect to spend two nights worth of work playing with material and lighting values until I got something close. I do not like the warp grill, but I know what I want to do with it.
When I get this thing finished, I'll start playing around with Cycles.
I added some details inside the cap and got tired of the trial and error rendering process of finding that pefect--no! acceptable--balance between transparency, surface emission, and unwanted shadows generated by the internal point lamp and projected on the inner surface of the cap. My internal details will have to be set to not cast shadows. Cycles should make light rendering a bit easier, I think. I've been playing with Blender all last year on an imported mesh, so I know my around around nodes, but at the moment I don't want devote a lot of time to fine tuning the cycles parameters to rid myself of much of the noise. At the moment, my interal renderer outputs a better looking image.
That's probably enough red-tipped internal detail so I'll stop before I fractalsponge the hell out of it. Will probably add some lights to increase my ray building render time. Had to turn off the shadow casting on the red-tipped details--you don't need to see what it looked like.
Thought the background was too dark.
Added some reflection.
Then brighter sun lamp and AO.
Turned on the ship lights for a sunset shot. Don't ask--just got carried away.