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3DA Sovereign styled Nova
WideFoot83
Posts: 81Member
I figured that it was finally time to try emulating a canon ship. If you head to my Deviant Art or Warehouse pages, you'll see that I tend toward unusual designs for my Star Trek ships. (the Ranger is my favorite.) This is in part because I like the freedom of using my own ideas, but also because much of my modeling is happenstance and I fear I would do canon ships injustice.
I thought I'd start with the Nova Class because it is small, but not overly simple. A nice challenge. Turns out, I disagree with many of the basic ideas behind that ship.
The saucer is great and I like the mono-hull design. It has a nice squat, rough-and-tumble feel to it's general proportions. But, the engineering section is a potato. It is lumpy and meanders around frustratingly. The deflector dish is a non-sequitur. The impulse drive is mounted so far off the center of mass that it breaks my suspension of disbelief.
But, the Sovereign is a real beauty aesthetic design.
I'm hoping I can take the great proportions and basic idea of the Nova and add some Sovereign design styles. My new goal is to make a ship which is at least usable in scenes by having enough canon styling to not look out of place.
The Nacelles are stand-ins. A different shape will be used for them, but I wanted to try a mix of the Nova and Sovereign styles.
The Waverider shuttle outline is also a stand-in and is borrowed from Raul Mamoru's Nova model.
I thought I'd start with the Nova Class because it is small, but not overly simple. A nice challenge. Turns out, I disagree with many of the basic ideas behind that ship.
The saucer is great and I like the mono-hull design. It has a nice squat, rough-and-tumble feel to it's general proportions. But, the engineering section is a potato. It is lumpy and meanders around frustratingly. The deflector dish is a non-sequitur. The impulse drive is mounted so far off the center of mass that it breaks my suspension of disbelief.
But, the Sovereign is a real beauty aesthetic design.
I'm hoping I can take the great proportions and basic idea of the Nova and add some Sovereign design styles. My new goal is to make a ship which is at least usable in scenes by having enough canon styling to not look out of place.
The Nacelles are stand-ins. A different shape will be used for them, but I wanted to try a mix of the Nova and Sovereign styles.
The Waverider shuttle outline is also a stand-in and is borrowed from Raul Mamoru's Nova model.
Post edited by WideFoot on
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The Sovereign curves are more pleasant and easier to create. (although, I still used a lofting technique)
Some of the original sketches show a simpler design, but the end result was somewhat different.
I also have discovered the joy of irregular bezier curves. There are a LOT of them in this model and I have a few plugins for it. I haven't decided which one I like best.
Grumble.
Good luck setting up a new rig man...
I still have my work laptop, but it is a 5-year old Think Pad to which I am not allowed to install programs. Surfing the web is about as interesting as it gets.
I was thoroughly unhappy with the ones that I had added as placeholders.
In the continuance of mixing styles, I needed something which has shape cues from both the sovereign and nova classes. It turns out, they have surprisingly different nacelles.
I'm debating whether I should round the edges on the bottom side. It would make things somewhat messy, but might add some attractiveness.
WIP4.jpg
WIP5.jpg
WIP6.jpg
To be honest, while I did like the overall design of the Nova class, the fluidity was frequently broken with harder edges on the nacelles, while TNG tried emphasizing the 'smoothness' and fluidity of the Galaxy class all round for instance.
The Intrepid compromises on fluidity with nacelle pylons for example and even sometimes seems a bit too 'busy' on the outside.
Anyway... have you considered perhaps extending the aft portion of the nacelle pylons so they look like an arc where they connect to the nacelles going further backwards (similar to what I scrubbed up in MS Paint)?
Hehe... I apologize if I ruined the look of the image, but I feel lazy and MS paint is a bit more limited than Adobe.
But you get the idea.
By the way, if anyone knows how to retrieve dialog boxes (which don't appear on the taskbar or in the alt-tab selector) from screens which are no longer attached to the computer, I'd love a solution.
By comparison, a typical concrete office building has a f-t-f height of 10 ft. and a steel building has 12 to 14 ft.
I was looking at the curves in the saucer and I am worried that the deck spacing and window locations will conspire to interrupt the bezier curve I have draped over the saucer which I was going to use for texturing.
I plan on mounting a pair of impulse engines to the lower/aft edge of the saucer.
By the way, all images are here. There are a few earlier images of the ship before the initial blocking was complete.
Namely, TOS Enterprise was originally imagined as most of the things being on the inside the ship... namely, technical efficiency means doing more with less.
We could try to apply this analogy here for example.
Some detailing on the hull can certainly be made, but avoid making it too busy... as if you want to emulate technical efficiency... things such as shield emitters and sensor arrays would probably be part of the hull - namely, designed to be part of the hull plating (think transparent windows that are capable of producing power from sunlight - that kind of thinking).
I was thinking on integrating something like that onto the Nightfire as I think that too much detailing might be the wrong direction for an advanced space-faring culture that's a lot more advanced.
But I digress, it's your design...
Btw, the new nacelle pylons certainly do look more appealing...
Specifically:
- Replicating many of the sensor arrays of the Nova Class
- Adding hull plate details similar to the Sovereign Class
- Adding a smattering of windows
- Vents in the nacelle struts
- Escape pods
- Impulse engines
- The hull plate grid detail (which many claim is the way deflector shields are projected)
But, I am planning to make the unblemished base model (the condition it is in now) available along with the final model.I do understand liking the smoother style. In TOS, that was a holdover from the smooth V2 rocket styled ships of Buck Rodgers and other works of that era. But, after 2001: A Space Odyssey, I think we can find a nice balance between the overall shape of a thing and the minute details in it.
And, Frankly, I like making the gritty stuff and looking at it.
My life lately has been eaten by 14-hour days at work (and I'll be working this holiday weekend, greeeat....), but I got a few holes cut into the sweep under the aft end, I put some windows in the back of the bridge, and I smoothed out the nacelles a bit
I'll probably work on this from the back to the front, mostly because I'm not sure what I'm going to do about a bridge yet.
After this, I will add some hull plates. Usually, I am meticulous about this step, but this time I'm going to try using Lib Fredo's joint push/pull tool and his tools-on-surface offset tool. It will add some annoying geometry and require more cleanup, but it will make the initial design steps much faster.
The final initial blocking geometry is also complete, so here is that mesh. (with some windows cut into the back of the bridge module.)
There is one thing I would like to suggest, though. The platform that the bridge will be sitting on doesn't flow very well into the lower platform behind it. Maybe you could consider setting up the region to flow on either side more like it is with the Sovereign, but instead of where the main shuttlebay door is you could use that as your observation room.
The lack of flow between those two platforms was a design idea I took from the Nova Class, which uses a similar series of platforms as it's spine.
But, I never really liked that area. I considered adding corner windows there, or something. But, that is just covering up a bad bit of design. You're right, it does need some smoothing. I can maintain the layered platform while adding some flow between the two.
Of course, this is not going to be an easy thing to build. hmmm...
And, to make things more complicated for me, the top of the engineering section of the Sovereign Class is at nearly the same angle as the dome of the saucer. That whole area is one of my favorite things about that design, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to replicate it here in the much more cramped space.
I did try an initial design. (This is not final at all; nothing was cut.) In favor of going this way, things flow a little better. In opposition, it crowds the spine somewhat frustratingly. It also will need a lot of thinking about how to make this shape with the best possible flow, and that will be hard.
And, now I can get back to greebling.
What does it look like from the side?
This evening I plan on cutting some additional holes for sensors in the bottom of the saucer, so an update is incoming.