I go through and clean up odd lines that aren't straight. When I think I've got them all, I highlight the back area and use a different smoothing method to make it look different.
Alternately, you could keep the sides and remove that back end, making it a different piece, but I think that would be harder in the end.
By far, this is one of the most challenging parts. Similar to what Eric said, I typically do a lot of cleaning up extra lines and making the geometry as pretty as possible. It's a long and involved process, but worth it in the end.
Your progress has definitely been fantastic. It took some of us years and multiple iterations to get a model anywhere near this good.
Day 54: I finally got the high poly end caps to look right!
Thanks to what I've been learning on this thread, the tutorial, and a couple hours worth of tutoring from a member of the AsteronX team this morning(the aerospace R&D organization startup that I volunteer at), I learned what I was doing wrong.
1. I didn't completely understand how to "remove doubles" with the current version of Blender, since there is no "remove doubles" button to click anymore. I thought it was just a simple matter of going to edit mode-select all verts-right click-merge verts by distance. Turns out I could customize the distance. As a result I ended up removing around 8,000'ish verts that I didn't need.
2. The second mistake I was making was that somehow my faces were inside out of the end cap model. I just learned the hard way of developing the habit of always double-checking face orientations when I make new models.
3. I was using a "low poly" cutout on a "high poly" model(in this case, the high poly model being the end cap). So when one of my fellow AsteronX team members walked me through his own ways of turning my low poly cutout into a high poly version, I then applied the boolean, the problem was instantly solved!
So excited to finally get the back of the endcap to look right. I learned so much about blender just doing this. Took me weeks to learn these simple things but it was worth it:
Yasss!!! At the end of the day I finally finished lesson 24! It feels good to finally "officially" place the starboard engine on the pylon permanetly, as opposed to the last time when I temporarily did it to make screen shots. Can't wait to finish the other details so I can mirror this.
I learned a lot more about Star Trek in general in these tutorials. Was amazed to find out that this whole time, the buzzard collectors were lit up by christmas lights wrapped around nails, lol.
In the lesson, I couldn't decide if I wanted to base the cutout on a cylinder or a UV sphere, so I created both cutouts, applied a boolean to a UV sphere style cutout, then I took the inner face of the cylinder cutout, seperated it from the rest of the cylinder cutout, and used the face by itself to create the flat bottom in the sphere style cutout...then applied the same material to make it blend in.
I learned a lot more about Star Trek in general in these tutorials. Was amazed to find out that this whole time, the buzzard collectors were lit up by christmas lights wrapped around nails, lol.
Yep, and all of that on a bed of broken colored mirror bits. The effect on screen is amazing, and it was a relatively inexpensive upgrade to make the ship seem more "alive" for when the show went to series.
Day 55. Finished learning how to make intercoolers(hope that's how you spell it). What's interesting is that these remind me of a real life starship engineering concept referred to as 'dusty plasma radiators'. I wonder if there's any connection. I know a lot of real life engineering concepts was used in the ST franchise over the years, so it wouldn't surprise me if these really are a star trek version of dusty plasma radiators.
Day 55. Finished learning how to make intercoolers(hope that's how you spell it). What's interesting is that these remind me of a real life starship engineering concept referred to as 'dusty plasma radiators'. I wonder if there's any connection. I know a lot of real life engineering concepts was used in the ST franchise over the years, so it wouldn't surprise me if these really are a star trek version of dusty plasma radiators.
Matt Jeffries (the designer of the original Enterprise) was an aeronautical engineer with substantial aviation experience, so those kinds of things are probably deliberate, not coincidental. Good eye.
Your work are very nice 👍
How do you get these diamonds ?
Thanks! I've been following scifieric's 3-D modeling tutorial. Here is the link to the specific lesson where scifieric teaches how to make those diamonds.
Thanks! I've been following scifieric's 3-D modeling tutorial. Here is the link to the specific lesson where scifieric teaches how to make those diamonds.
Thanks! I've been following scifieric's 3-D modeling tutorial. Here is the link to the specific lesson where scifieric teaches how to make those diamonds.
It took me 8 hours worth of grinding today to get it to look right, but today I finished the details in the inner trench of the warp engine and I made two versions of the warp engine:
1. Did the classic 1960's look
2. I figured out how to have blue glowing warp plasma like the Enterprise-D in TNG...WITHOUT screwing up the classic design! WOOT
After I created a variant of the 1701 warp engine with a TNG style blue lighting, I messed around and was able to figure out how to create an NX-01 style blue lighting as well and it looks great!
here is what it looks like with and without using points of light in the renders:
lol above I attempted to make the blue lights accurate to the NX-01 by memory but after looking up reference photos on google, I noticed immediately that I messed up. So here is a MORE accurate version of my NX-01 style lights:
Day 61, learned how to render and do lighting a little better. used to have a problem of the lighting being too bright and washing out the hull color lol. Instead of using actual light sources, suns, etc, in lesson 31 of the tutorial I'm using I learned that I could create planes, assign emission materials to them, and adjust some item property settings so that the planes don't show. ...and WOW the difference that made!
Instead of using actual light sources, suns, etc, in lesson 31 of the tutorial I'm using I learned that I could create planes, assign emission materials to them, and adjust some item property settings so that the planes don't show. ...and WOW the difference that made!
That sounds great! Well done, and make sure you share the tutorial(s) with people!
I had to go through the "materials lessons part 1 and 2" twice in order to fully learn it just because of how much of a rookie I am when it comes to the materials aspect of blender.
I feel like I have finally achieved that "reach out and touch it" feel of renders that I have been drooling over in other people's work here on this forum haha.
Here's a link to "part 1" of the material lessons I'm referring to:
Day 63. Wasn't able to get much done today beyond adding some grebles (I think that's what they're called) to the port and starboard engineering arms, due to taking a break and rendering some blend files containing modeling/animations done by the head of AsteronX for our new upcoming AsteronX video on youtube. It's gonna be a good one.
Also, I added the leather things that was on the edges of the studio model's impulse engine frame...at least that's what they will look like for now until I can figure out how to simulate the texture that was on them:
I'm getting ready to scale up my entire 3D model of the USS Enterprise using a method that Todd, the head of AsteronX and my personal mentor on Blender taught me, but had to make some changes first. After that, i'll be creating the 5 sided cube rooms for the windows taught in scifieric's tutorial.
First thing I did was finally completly rebuild the B,C deck from scratch. I made a lot of mistakes with it, it wasn't really conforming to the blue prints, etc...but thanks to all the stuff I learned since then, when I re-watched scifieric's lesson on how to build it, it was easy to build another B,C deck and make it more accurate this time.
Here's the before and after pics of me redoing the B,C deck:
I was going through a PDF of an old starfleet technical manual, another fellow member of AsteronX sent me to help me with my 3D modeling exercise and I was intrigued by this page in the manual:
. . . so I adjusted the blue lighting accordingly.
Ironic that it looks a lot like my first attempt at the nx-01 style lights. This sits better with me so I'm keeping this latest blue lighting configuration.
Ironic that it looks a lot like my first attempt at the nx-01 style lights. This sits better with me so I'm keeping this latest blue lighting configuration.
Posts
Alternately, you could keep the sides and remove that back end, making it a different piece, but I think that would be harder in the end.
Your progress has definitely been fantastic. It took some of us years and multiple iterations to get a model anywhere near this good.
Day 54: I finally got the high poly end caps to look right!
Thanks to what I've been learning on this thread, the tutorial, and a couple hours worth of tutoring from a member of the AsteronX team this morning(the aerospace R&D organization startup that I volunteer at), I learned what I was doing wrong.
1. I didn't completely understand how to "remove doubles" with the current version of Blender, since there is no "remove doubles" button to click anymore. I thought it was just a simple matter of going to edit mode-select all verts-right click-merge verts by distance. Turns out I could customize the distance. As a result I ended up removing around 8,000'ish verts that I didn't need.
2. The second mistake I was making was that somehow my faces were inside out of the end cap model. I just learned the hard way of developing the habit of always double-checking face orientations when I make new models.
3. I was using a "low poly" cutout on a "high poly" model(in this case, the high poly model being the end cap). So when one of my fellow AsteronX team members walked me through his own ways of turning my low poly cutout into a high poly version, I then applied the boolean, the problem was instantly solved!
So excited to finally get the back of the endcap to look right. I learned so much about blender just doing this. Took me weeks to learn these simple things but it was worth it:
I learned a lot more about Star Trek in general in these tutorials. Was amazed to find out that this whole time, the buzzard collectors were lit up by christmas lights wrapped around nails, lol.
In the lesson, I couldn't decide if I wanted to base the cutout on a cylinder or a UV sphere, so I created both cutouts, applied a boolean to a UV sphere style cutout, then I took the inner face of the cylinder cutout, seperated it from the rest of the cylinder cutout, and used the face by itself to create the flat bottom in the sphere style cutout...then applied the same material to make it blend in.
Yep, and all of that on a bed of broken colored mirror bits. The effect on screen is amazing, and it was a relatively inexpensive upgrade to make the ship seem more "alive" for when the show went to series.
How do you get these diamonds ?
Matt Jeffries (the designer of the original Enterprise) was an aeronautical engineer with substantial aviation experience, so those kinds of things are probably deliberate, not coincidental. Good eye.
Current Projects:
Ambassador Class
Thanks! I've been following scifieric's 3-D modeling tutorial. Here is the link to the specific lesson where scifieric teaches how to make those diamonds.
Aw! Thank you for sharing!
You're doing a GREAT job! Keep up the good work!
Thank you very much!
Did the box radiators today:
It took me 8 hours worth of grinding today to get it to look right, but today I finished the details in the inner trench of the warp engine and I made two versions of the warp engine:
1. Did the classic 1960's look
2. I figured out how to have blue glowing warp plasma like the Enterprise-D in TNG...WITHOUT screwing up the classic design! WOOT
After I created a variant of the 1701 warp engine with a TNG style blue lighting, I messed around and was able to figure out how to create an NX-01 style blue lighting as well and it looks great!
here is what it looks like with and without using points of light in the renders:
That sounds great! Well done, and make sure you share the tutorial(s) with people!
I had to go through the "materials lessons part 1 and 2" twice in order to fully learn it just because of how much of a rookie I am when it comes to the materials aspect of blender.
I feel like I have finally achieved that "reach out and touch it" feel of renders that I have been drooling over in other people's work here on this forum haha.
Here's a link to "part 1" of the material lessons I'm referring to:
Finished mirroring the second warp engine.
Also, I added the leather things that was on the edges of the studio model's impulse engine frame...at least that's what they will look like for now until I can figure out how to simulate the texture that was on them:
I'm getting ready to scale up my entire 3D model of the USS Enterprise using a method that Todd, the head of AsteronX and my personal mentor on Blender taught me, but had to make some changes first. After that, i'll be creating the 5 sided cube rooms for the windows taught in scifieric's tutorial.
First thing I did was finally completly rebuild the B,C deck from scratch. I made a lot of mistakes with it, it wasn't really conforming to the blue prints, etc...but thanks to all the stuff I learned since then, when I re-watched scifieric's lesson on how to build it, it was easy to build another B,C deck and make it more accurate this time.
Here's the before and after pics of me redoing the B,C deck:
I was going through a PDF of an old starfleet technical manual, another fellow member of AsteronX sent me to help me with my 3D modeling exercise and I was intrigued by this page in the manual:
. . . so I adjusted the blue lighting accordingly.
Ironic that it looks a lot like my first attempt at the nx-01 style lights. This sits better with me so I'm keeping this latest blue lighting configuration.
LOL! There are limits to what I know! I honestly don't know what they used, but I know what it looks like.
Very cool!
It looks like an Ace bandage to me.