3DTrek Warp 2 craft -- Blender Cycles

psCargile

Roughing out an idea for a warp 2 capable exo-interstellar science ship, circa late 21st century.

psCargile

The concept was too TOS, so I took some cues from the Intrepid and NX. This is the third build of the primary hull, and the first of this configuration, and I'll probably build it again as I figure out better ways to get the geometry I want and the proper workflow to achieve desirable results (like when to bevel edges. I found before I Knife cut across the top of the hull works best, though I have to clean up some Insets.) Not sure if I'm keeping the bridge module or opting for something to hint back at the DY series. Decks are supposed to be 9 feet tall, but apparently I'm off at the bridge. The figure was generated from the Manuel Bastioni Lab add-on.

At first I was going to name this ship after a river in my native state, but for something putting around the Kupier Belt, the Oort Cloud, and the heliopause, I thought an astronomer was more fitting, thus I'm christening it the UESPA NR008 Johann Holetschek .

evil_genius_180

Very nice. I really like your latest go at the saucer. :thumb:

Vortex5972

I second E_G. Looking forward to seeing this develop.

psCargile

Thanks.

The front cut out is for sensor pallets and antenna arrays. Not certain if I'm going to make the aft engineering modules pressurized habitats. I've decided the impulse engines will be pulsed inductive thrusters (Atomic Rockets Engine List), and each nacelle will have an antimatter warp reactor, and antimatter storage, and no Bussard collection system—tanking off at Jupiter shouldn't be a problem before you head of to Sedna and Makemake. And there will be landerlike excursion vehicles parked somewhere and most likely docked externally.

psCargile

I attempted a rebuild of the midsection by extruding and flattening the faces of a cylinder, but I didn't like the resulting geometry, so I kept what I already had and made some tweaks to it. The saucer is still mirrored until I get all the symmetrical details built, then I'll apply the modifier and close the front and back.

The figure is standing at the plane of the saucer deck floor.

evil_genius_180

It's looking nice so far.

psCargile

Some updates from over the weekend.





Active phased array sensor globe. May go back to a single color. Don't like the emitter glow seeping around edge. Made a transparent snowglobe to fit over it, but it looked a little off. My try something translucent instead.



Not happy with these windows.

The high gain antenna just floating around is slightly larger than the one on New Horizons, so I suppose it is big enough. No idea where it's going to go. I use a parabola calculator made for dish design to get the correct focal distance because I want my sh it to be real.



Thinking of moving the fwd observation window forward.

evil_genius_180

I like that look for the sensor. It's different. I wasn't sure about it at first but, as I looked at the photos more it grew on me.

psCargile

The sensor dome is from an add-on that makes different polyhedrons, but I had a flat faced ball turret more in mind. Coming off of Rhinoceros, I've learned that Rhino allows for precise building of geometry with little geometry editing, and Blender is the opposite. I could use Boolean operations with great effect in Rhino, and it seems better to avoid them in Blender. Using Face Insets and Extrusions creates too many straight angles, which bevelling doesn't always fix with satisfaction. For the front windows, in Rhino it's a simple task to create a rectangle of "curves" and chamfer the corners into arcs, extrude the result as a solid, position, and Boolean subtract, and I would have a nice window indention the way I envisioned it. In Blender, I duplicated the face, separated it, added a subsurface modifier to chamfer the corners, apply the modifier, loop select the outer border, inverse the selection, delete it, collapse the extra vertices, make it a face, shrink if needed, extrude, recalculate the normals, and add a Boolean modifier. Anyone know if there is a way to turn corners into arcs on inset faces? Blender advertises itself to be the quickest way to model, but I'm not finding that to be true. Maybe I don't know all the tricks, and the edge tools I've tried didn't give me what I wanted.

On the rebuild, I'm thinking of creating a rounded cube, scaling to the window size, cutting it in half, maybe bevel the raw edge, and use that as my Boolean object.

psCargile

I forgot, in Rhino you can make rounded rectangles, so that's one less step.

I think I have the first version of Rhino, which has a lackluster rendered, which is why I switched to Blender.

evil_genius_180

Yeah, one thing I don't like about Blender is its lack of precision. Lightwave is very precise but Blender, as you say, is the opposite. I agree about the booleans modifier, it creates a lot of issues.

psCargile

In Rhino, I can build a mathematically correct parabolic dish. In Blender I have to create a circle face, inset it a number of times, and use proportional scaling to get a close approximation.

evil_genius_180

Yeah, Lightwave has that kind of control too. But, I have Blender now. I absolutely hate not having that level of precision. I'm half tempted to buy a Mac just so I can run Lightwave again. (I'm not going back to Windows)

psCargile

I looked at some videos of Rhino v. 5, and almost wept at their geometry editing capabilities, which looked on par or better than Blender. But it's a $1000 program and it's internal renderer isn't better. But one is for engineering and one is for art, so . . .

Didn't have a lot of time yesterday on the model. I removed the windows and rebuilt the hull, and played around with cargo doors on the backside, using a RoundedCube as a Boolean difference object that came out alright. I'll have that posted this evening.

psCargile

Rebuilt the sensor array. Cargo door insets.

psCargile

And now for a horrific engineering challenge.



Internally, I could slide the door inboard and rotate it parallel with the ship's longitudinal axis, or have it removable from the outside.

psCargile

Working on the PITengine set.

evil_genius_180

Very nice.