Ok, after a few false starts and just getting to it vs avoiding it. Warp grill cutouts and better flowed front housings. I probably could have gotten the grill openings in in subdiv but they are inserted in just prior to a final subdiv. I have to count grill rings before I decide how I plan to do the gold grill bits. Likely extrude the grills from edges in a base mesh below the final blue glass stuff. It will be a built nacelle like my regular builds as I need the guts for future plans. Hence why I stuck with known internal arrangements of components.
dunno my burger buns still seem tall vs photos. That aft curvature is just arugh.
A quick and wrong count grill and glow extra.
counting 20 ribs roughly. from various views, 4 in the gap and 8 on top and bottom of those 4. Though they do seem uneven on the model so I might have to fool about to replicate that.
Well, crap was planning to stop after the last post but meh. Got all 20 grooves in and not so sure on the material. They are inset too far so I will likely expand the diffusion material past the gold grills. As for the gold/copper, I cannot tell if it is like what was seen on the Ambassador or not or just a flat color. Last image I have a cyan object glowing behind to fake the uneven light of the original. Plan later on is to build the guts and put elements with glow as expected to exist in the nacelle and let it do what it will through the grills.
oh and a few with post glows via vray's framebuffer tool.
Burger buns. . . Left is adjusted right is adjusted more and flattened out towards the back. I think the right one is closer to the studio model.
Think the stripes here will show the slight change between the two.
think I figured out one of the things that is bugging me about these and that is the trim around the bussard is too tall.
vs
Can really see on various shots they really sanded the model down to the point of removing or rounding off details.
yup it has polies on all sides. and is 3~10in thick depending on which element is selected. Using a 2 glass layer one to produce the matte gloss hits on the outside and to affect a "off" look with no red in.
Translucency settings are not working right on my end it is on or off with the other settings doing little to nothing so I cannot adjust it. It could be a setting somewhere that needs to be set that I am missing. 2019 is frustrating as you get your mouse within 50~100pixels of a drop menu or anything but a radio box and it scrolls through those menus. So with all the longer than a 2560p display menus in max your constantly scrolling through things accidentally. One driving me nuts ATM is material ID selection while Im scrolling down the menu to set smoothing groups.
Thing I am lacking most right now is the backside or "inside" acting like a frosted pane of glass with a projector projecting light against it. I can get it to scatter enough to "fill" the lens but the setting have to be so high that it obliterates all the elements inside. So as said it has no granularity to it just flips on or off. NOW dunno that could just be Mental Ray was cheating somewhere or what not. I mean they did have the lazy thin walled setting on transparency which was nice, exp for things like windows where I did not care about IQR and all of that light and glass thickness stuff. Just a gloss hit of the surface and possible tint or slight blurring of distant bits of the rooms.
Anyhow, i do know I need to read up on rendering settings and more on materials. The Depth settings I have to keep looking up etc. I just keep putting it off as I would rather model but it is getting to the stage that I am ready to save a render when it is 50% done as Even at 200% I really cannot see what it is that vray is doing anymore! Maybe some slight removal of grain in some small corner someplace. ADD in that on anything in subdivd shadows sometimes render with blocks in vs a nice smooth gradient.
you can see this in the nacelle butts. I managed to avoid it in most of the wip images that I have posted.
So this is another thing I have to find what setting affects it and adjust it out. What is odd is if I turn off say isoline display or increase or decrease iterations in subdiv it goes away. They do not correspond to the geo either. They do not break on any vert or edge.
Nits aside it is just small issues atm and a loss of some of the workflow I am used to. Stuff like render material override, buttons from v-ray tool bar not working anymore when I move them to other toolbars. I think this is a max 2019 thing.
oh wow wrote a wall. . . . heh
Eitherway, learning curve for someone impatient and lazy.
MEH, got sick of looking up why translucent is a light switch and settings affected nothing. I found a mess of really old tuts basically explaining how to use another shade rto do single sided poly renders for all of this. So that means I can use that for windows as I do not want to create thickness for those. Solution so far? I just made the outside bussard cap super stupid thick. Like 8ft. Render of the pair of nacelles the close one has the thicker cap with the red cap embedded inside. (mostly because I was a lazy ass and just left that one alone.) the inner cap is something like 1ft thick. Far nacelle is the old thin caps.
Nacelles have canon room inside as well as coils and some misc bits. (all of these I will need later on) So due to that you can see some of it through the grills.
I dunno how I will rig the glows in the end though. Considered doing a thin tube that goes around the rim or just place a rod that ignores some of the internal bits. One trick that wont work in v-ray that works in Mental Ray is how matte clear surfaces act as a projection screen by showing shadows of things with light behind them. Least I have yet to replicate this effect YET.
One trick that wont work in v-ray that works in Mental Ray is how matte clear surfaces act as a projection screen by showing shadows of things with light behind them. Least I have yet to replicate this effect YET.
Can you show an example? Not sure what this means.
Not the best but you can see how the shadow of the warp coil bit is on the grill vs it just being light not wrapping around the object. I cannot find anything better short of rendering it out on the old pc. I think some of the bussard renders show the blurred reflected surface on the inside ofthe caps too but it really ate up render times so I was doing other thi9ngs to get around it. V-ray I would probably do the same until I went to do a final render for a scene. A good example of this is in the renders I have done where your looking at a 3/4 rear towards the front view and your looking through to the backside of the front of the bussard dome it just goes black or this odd "green" in MR if it is correct or not it would reflect the contents and that area would be colored. It is like vray is limiting the reflectance count.
I think it is just how mr did things vs v-ray. V-ray for example can glow through clear stuff far more readily than mr ever could.
can see the inside of the dome through the dome and the blurred reflections so it does not go "clear"
https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VRAY4MAX/VRayMtl
half way down are some samples. I could never get the same results. hard wax would just have a internal glow but look more like paper, water did not change anything really and trans thickness did nothing at all. Maybe it has something to do with gizmos vs HDRI or something I have yet to learn.
The non shell EG single sided poly shader referenced to is the vray2sided mat. Looking at the chaosgroup site so far it looks to be a tool for older versions to get translucent. Dunno it did do some interesting things but at that point it was super late to I moved on as Making the dome super thick worked and was closer to what I wanted. I still could not get translucency to work right or least work with adjustments. Even with the thick bussard caps or the thin ones. I did not though try a solid one EG the whole tip being solid vs a inner poly structure.
Anyhow I was just wanting to match the "projected" shadow like thing you see in some of the ref images of the D. Some times it looks like a lens reflection and other times it looks like I guess the best description is a flattened blurred texture mapped on to the bussard.
What I really wanted though is to get a off look the studio model has or had, and then only need to "turn on" the internals to light it up. ATM I have to do more than hide the glowing contents of the bussard.
Not a massive update errands and the human malware situation here is pretty bad. Likely more panic or sillyness than anything. Idiots thinking hand sanitizer will save them. Nozzle bottles everywhere, more likely to catch something when touching those filthy things that everyone else has touched with their filthy unwashed hands full of hand sanitizer glop.
Anyhow I remembered I needed to fix those wobbles in the lower hull. I am still a bit vague as to what goes on near the top of the warp cutout and the root of the strut. Still cannot get that rim and undercut long the side to look how I see it in the photos. Shrug.
Well before I caught my cat pissing on the carpet I had plans to figure out how to depict Picards Ready room window. I had made some adjustments to blob out some of the parts to better match the photos. The real issue is yes in canon we get a flat bent wall that is on a blobly hull detail. Real issue besides this is interior it is about 2.5Xat least 5ft. There is no way that will fit on a recessed deck which all of deck A is. It is more of a half deck as the bridge forward floor is sunken down, I think at the same level as the conference room out back. not sure if that deck is level with the forward decks in the pill shape. All of which I gather from articles and most of the blues is a detachable escape craft. Apparently all those windows are lounges of some sort which silly are only accessible from the bridge via the conference room.
So idea is I create a basement easement like hole in the area around the window to get the right height or fudge it and call the window as a waist high only affair and stop the jamb above the deck level. pink box is a 2X2X5 block. 5.5ft girl for reference.
and yes the blister and ugly mapped 360 image of the bridge are gonna go. Just going to do a frosted dome with a picture under. not willing to build a low poly bridge to render out or have inside.
Probably wasting life on this but merging in the different bumps. Doing the same trick used with the nacelles, half subdiv freeze it then edit the lower density cage and apply subdiv.
OOps, just dawned on me I forgot to do the bump for the odd rectangular battle bridge turbo lift. Debating if I will weld it in5to the lower deck, but likely I will do it as a basic chamfer vs a subdiv object.
Ok, I think I got this part to match to the set details where there is ceiling continuing past the windows. Really hate this lower deck. heh.
Also not sure if the dark bit behind is suppose to be part of the inset these decks sit in or just a marking or plating.
Really hating this part of the ship. HEH. Likely find other parts I will hate like all the rim windows on the secondary hull. Anyhow I think I have them all aligned and placed in the right places.
Started on the sodding windows. All the control edges for this thing's shape make for a lot of manual fiddling. The gap between bothers me but narrower and there feels like too little between pairs across the thing. Also had modeled a "bottom" as it is pretty clear they intended this to be a large detachable craft at some point. It will also come in hands for the planned use of this model.
Hopefully the rest of this will speed up. Also debating on the level of surface detail. Some scenes in TNG they show the outside in from the conference room and there is ribs and outer detail between the windows etc. Also rounding the frames of these more to fit with what we see from the inside which is a fairly large round jamb.
SOOO wish I could customize the V-ray frame buffer layout and buttons.
That's the problem with her, she's breathtakingly beautiful, but also a pain to model!
Yeah i think any of the canon ships would probably give me fits, it is fitting what we can do in cgi to what was easy to do or fudge as a physical object. If I were to model this shape without a canon need to match I would have done all the window jambs fairly flat or enough of a shallow curve to allow the rounded corners to clear the edges, or to allow them to lay in a single plane vs being at all sorts of varied angles. Heck that bridge bump probably has more polies in it than the entire saucer. I am hoping to be able to eliminate some of the geo on it down the road as I clean things up but I feel this model will cap 3m polies easily. Much more for the planned work this model is for, that iteration will likely clear 5 or 6m polies.
well, hell she is already at 2.2mpolies. Well the file is. so there are junk objects etc but at this stage it is still fairly fat.
That's the problem with her, she's breathtakingly beautiful, but also a pain to model!
I finally took a break from my Galaxy class. I had cramps in my hands from doing all the windows. I wonder if anyone has ever counted them. Off the top of my head I would bet at least 500. Heck, could be a thousand.
lol yeah I remember that. Also remember when 2m polies would make my pc crawl at 5fps in viewports lol. Still cannot believe Im using a 12 core cpu w24 threads but then again there are 4k cpus with 64cores so hah.
Yeah windows I do not look forward to those funky rear secondary glass at all those strange angles.
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dunno my burger buns still seem tall vs photos. That aft curvature is just arugh.
counting 20 ribs roughly. from various views, 4 in the gap and 8 on top and bottom of those 4. Though they do seem uneven on the model so I might have to fool about to replicate that.
oh and a few with post glows via vray's framebuffer tool.
And unlike the neon tubes in the filming miniature, these nacelles won't have a tendency to zap people!
Think the stripes here will show the slight change between the two.
vs
Can really see on various shots they really sanded the model down to the point of removing or rounding off details.
Frequent updates at our Discord channel!
Translucency settings are not working right on my end it is on or off with the other settings doing little to nothing so I cannot adjust it. It could be a setting somewhere that needs to be set that I am missing. 2019 is frustrating as you get your mouse within 50~100pixels of a drop menu or anything but a radio box and it scrolls through those menus. So with all the longer than a 2560p display menus in max your constantly scrolling through things accidentally. One driving me nuts ATM is material ID selection while Im scrolling down the menu to set smoothing groups.
Thing I am lacking most right now is the backside or "inside" acting like a frosted pane of glass with a projector projecting light against it. I can get it to scatter enough to "fill" the lens but the setting have to be so high that it obliterates all the elements inside. So as said it has no granularity to it just flips on or off. NOW dunno that could just be Mental Ray was cheating somewhere or what not. I mean they did have the lazy thin walled setting on transparency which was nice, exp for things like windows where I did not care about IQR and all of that light and glass thickness stuff. Just a gloss hit of the surface and possible tint or slight blurring of distant bits of the rooms.
Anyhow, i do know I need to read up on rendering settings and more on materials. The Depth settings I have to keep looking up etc. I just keep putting it off as I would rather model but it is getting to the stage that I am ready to save a render when it is 50% done as Even at 200% I really cannot see what it is that vray is doing anymore! Maybe some slight removal of grain in some small corner someplace. ADD in that on anything in subdivd shadows sometimes render with blocks in vs a nice smooth gradient.
you can see this in the nacelle butts. I managed to avoid it in most of the wip images that I have posted.
So this is another thing I have to find what setting affects it and adjust it out. What is odd is if I turn off say isoline display or increase or decrease iterations in subdiv it goes away. They do not correspond to the geo either. They do not break on any vert or edge.
Nits aside it is just small issues atm and a loss of some of the workflow I am used to. Stuff like render material override, buttons from v-ray tool bar not working anymore when I move them to other toolbars. I think this is a max 2019 thing.
oh wow wrote a wall. . . . heh
Eitherway, learning curve for someone impatient and lazy.
Nacelles have canon room inside as well as coils and some misc bits. (all of these I will need later on) So due to that you can see some of it through the grills.
I dunno how I will rig the glows in the end though. Considered doing a thin tube that goes around the rim or just place a rod that ignores some of the internal bits. One trick that wont work in v-ray that works in Mental Ray is how matte clear surfaces act as a projection screen by showing shadows of things with light behind them. Least I have yet to replicate this effect YET.
Can you show an example? Not sure what this means.
Frequent updates at our Discord channel!
I think it is just how mr did things vs v-ray. V-ray for example can glow through clear stuff far more readily than mr ever could.
can see the inside of the dome through the dome and the blurred reflections so it does not go "clear"
https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VRAY4MAX/VRayMtl
half way down are some samples. I could never get the same results. hard wax would just have a internal glow but look more like paper, water did not change anything really and trans thickness did nothing at all. Maybe it has something to do with gizmos vs HDRI or something I have yet to learn.
The non shell EG single sided poly shader referenced to is the vray2sided mat. Looking at the chaosgroup site so far it looks to be a tool for older versions to get translucent. Dunno it did do some interesting things but at that point it was super late to I moved on as Making the dome super thick worked and was closer to what I wanted. I still could not get translucency to work right or least work with adjustments. Even with the thick bussard caps or the thin ones. I did not though try a solid one EG the whole tip being solid vs a inner poly structure.
Anyhow I was just wanting to match the "projected" shadow like thing you see in some of the ref images of the D. Some times it looks like a lens reflection and other times it looks like I guess the best description is a flattened blurred texture mapped on to the bussard.
What I really wanted though is to get a off look the studio model has or had, and then only need to "turn on" the internals to light it up. ATM I have to do more than hide the glowing contents of the bussard.
Anyhow I remembered I needed to fix those wobbles in the lower hull. I am still a bit vague as to what goes on near the top of the warp cutout and the root of the strut. Still cannot get that rim and undercut long the side to look how I see it in the photos. Shrug.
So idea is I create a basement easement like hole in the area around the window to get the right height or fudge it and call the window as a waist high only affair and stop the jamb above the deck level. pink box is a 2X2X5 block. 5.5ft girl for reference.
and yes the blister and ugly mapped 360 image of the bridge are gonna go. Just going to do a frosted dome with a picture under. not willing to build a low poly bridge to render out or have inside.
OOps, just dawned on me I forgot to do the bump for the odd rectangular battle bridge turbo lift. Debating if I will weld it in5to the lower deck, but likely I will do it as a basic chamfer vs a subdiv object.
Also not sure if the dark bit behind is suppose to be part of the inset these decks sit in or just a marking or plating.
Hopefully the rest of this will speed up. Also debating on the level of surface detail. Some scenes in TNG they show the outside in from the conference room and there is ribs and outer detail between the windows etc. Also rounding the frames of these more to fit with what we see from the inside which is a fairly large round jamb.
SOOO wish I could customize the V-ray frame buffer layout and buttons.
Yeah i think any of the canon ships would probably give me fits, it is fitting what we can do in cgi to what was easy to do or fudge as a physical object. If I were to model this shape without a canon need to match I would have done all the window jambs fairly flat or enough of a shallow curve to allow the rounded corners to clear the edges, or to allow them to lay in a single plane vs being at all sorts of varied angles. Heck that bridge bump probably has more polies in it than the entire saucer. I am hoping to be able to eliminate some of the geo on it down the road as I clean things up but I feel this model will cap 3m polies easily. Much more for the planned work this model is for, that iteration will likely clear 5 or 6m polies.
well, hell she is already at 2.2mpolies. Well the file is. so there are junk objects etc but at this stage it is still fairly fat.
Yeah windows I do not look forward to those funky rear secondary glass at all those strange angles.