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3DNCC-1701, no bloody A,B,C or D (my progress so far)

13

Posts

  • Paul MoechnerPaul Moechner541 Posts: 126Member
    edited November 2022 #62
    Ok, according to wikipedia, the 1701 Enterprise is 288.6 metres (947 ft) long and 127.1 metres (417 ft) wide. If I scaled the model correctly, the 6 foot blue object I put on top of the saucer in this render shows what a 6 foot tall human being looks like in scale to the 1701 Enterprise.

    Edit: I didn't scale this ship correctly due to some rookie mistakes I made and due to not even considering height. According to Wikipedia this ship is also 72.6 metres (238 ft) tall. I redid the whole scaling and either I don't understand what I did wrong(if I did anything wrong) but the ship's height is short by 3.39 meters, and the ship's length is short by 1.28 meters. Since this is a fictional starship, I took some creative license by grabbing the warp engines and pulling them back by 1.28 meters to fix the ship-length problem. But I have no idea how to fix the ship's height issue of 3.39 meters without messing up the overall look/feel of the ship so I left that alone. I then created a new object, a cylinder that is exactly 6 feet tall and put it on top of the saucer to show the scale of a 6ft human compaired to the rest of the ship.

    Below is my NEW render after redoing my scaling:
    xi0ys93g7z3b.png

    and here is the image showing what I'm talking about regarding the ship being too short by 3.39 meters after scaling up everything so that the ship is exactly 127.1 meters wide:
    f7e9z8tj9fo0.jpg

    Post edited by Paul Moechner on
    Rory1707StarCruiserscifiericLizzy777wibblesrspicerJES
  • Paul MoechnerPaul Moechner541 Posts: 126Member
    edited November 2022 #63
    Day 69 nice:

    Well this whole "scaling" thing turned into a whole adventure in and of itself and I made some interesting discoveries about the world of star trek and the starships that are in it.

    After I went through the whole learning process of learning to scale my 3D model of the 1701 Enterprise up to the scale shown in wikipedia, which interestingly enough also is the same scale measurements of the starfleet technical manual I've been referencing, I figured out pretty quickly that this "cannon scale" is TOO SMALL compaired to the scale of the Enterprise I grew up watching on TV. The bridge would be too small using the 'cannon scale', the shuttle bay is too small, etc.

    So as an experiment, I went back to a previous save in my blender files of this 3D modeling exercise, where I didn't scale it up to cannon yet.

    I then used the starfleet technical manual along with paint to help me figure out just how wide the bridge section really is from hull to hull and this is what I came up with:
    txkf5ieyjebb.jpg

    But even then, 16.8 meters wasn't big enough so after screwing up and screwing around I came up with the figure 20.8 meters.

    I then created a measuring tool in blender, which is just a cube that I stretched out to exactly 20.8 meters wide, and then I scaled up the ENTIRE ship, until the bridge section fits 20.8 meters. I chose to use this picture of the bridge because it was scaled correctly around the average size of human beings and fits what I saw on TV of the bridge.


    ...and this is when something REALLY INTERESTING happened!

    EVERYthing is now to correct scale, according to a six foot tall person! Below are images of an exactly 6 foot tall cylinder, simulating a human being(1.8288 meters tall) compared to certain parts of the ship using this "new scale":

    ot7fs00mckn3.png
    2iut13cak9ao.png
    hez89fu2rtg5.png
    qdry059lk79e.png

    I'm officially calling this new scale the "Paul Scale" hahaha

    And yes, I already understand that the real truth is that the scale of the ship is as big or as small as the plot requires(a statement I found while googling this subject) and I agree, but if you were to
    1. correctly scale the bridge around a 6 foot tall human being
    2. scale the rest of the ship around the bridge specifically

    The result is what I now call the Paul scale.

    According to blender, these are the dimensions for the "Paul Scale" lol:

    Length(front to back): 457 meters(1499.34 feet)
    6hhbp7g5da8a.jpg

    Width(left to right): 202 meters(662.73 feet)
    1jdwk8pbttcu.jpg

    Height(top to bottom): 110 meters(360.892 feet)
    s5c06hsa03uz.jpg

    Post edited by Paul Moechner on
    Rory1707StarCruisercaveat_imperatorevil_genius_180Lizzy777publiusrwibblesrspicerscifiericJES
  • StarCruiserStarCruiser363 Posts: 44Member
    No, no, no - Starfleet uses TARDIS tech (they just don't brag about it).
    Paul Moechnerscifieric
  • Paul MoechnerPaul Moechner541 Posts: 126Member
    No, no, no - Starfleet uses TARDIS tech (they just don't brag about it).

    rofl
    scifieric
  • Paul MoechnerPaul Moechner541 Posts: 126Member
    edited November 2022 #66
    Day 70:

    here's some pics of me creating rooms inside the ship behind the windows. each room started off as a cube that was 2 meters x 2 meters x 2 meters. As per scifieric's tutorial, I delete the face on one side of the cube and then start making a room behind the windows. and stretching verts to make the cubes conform to the outer hull and to create long or short rooms to cover 1 or more windows.

    This results in each room being exactly 2 meters from floor to ceiling. As you can see in these pics, applying the "Paul Scale" to the ship's overall size, there is exactly enough room to fit in the starship's superstructure(ship's frame), turbo-lift shafts, jefferies tubes, power conduits(the famous EPS grids in star trek), etc.

    uz1b1igrg6s3.jpg
    nhcvv9jv1g5s.jpg
    And here are my cylinders that I used to simulate a 6 foot tall human. Each cylinder is 0.5 meters(1.64042 feet) thick and 6 feet tall.
    6k7md1ytpau6.jpg
    vh6w6xfc9xgq.png





    Post edited by Paul Moechner on
    Rory1707evil_genius_180StarCruisercaveat_imperatorLizzy777wibblesrspicerscifiericJES
  • Paul MoechnerPaul Moechner541 Posts: 126Member
    Day 70 continued:

    Today I finished making rooms and lighting within the rooms behind the windows throughout the whole ship. I combined some things that scifieric taught in his tutorial(5 sided cubes and using planes as lighting sources) with something that folks at AsteronX taught me in regards to lighting the inside of a ship. The other technique I combined is that I took the planes that I assigned emission materials to and created patterns. I also created partial UV spheres and assigned emmision materials to them and had physical 5-sided cubes for simulating rooms behind some windows and other groups of windows I had lit up by UV spheres and then I created dividers out of other planes. This created a really cool illusion of the lights of the ship lighting up differently depending on what angle you are looking at the ship.

    6zbipm93xlln.jpg
    zoul3tkegd02.jpg




    evil_genius_180StarCruiserashleytingerscifiericcaveat_imperatorLizzy777srspicerpubliusrJES
  • Vortex5972Vortex5972321 Posts: 1,202Member
    She's looking good.
    Paul Moechnerscifieric
  • Paul MoechnerPaul Moechner541 Posts: 126Member
    edited November 2022 #69
    Day 71:

    After all the work I did yesterday, creating internal rooms, internal lighting mixed with things that gave the illusion of internal rooms and lighting, today, I completely re-did EVERYTHING after I got an idea on how to make it all better by more heavily utilizing scifieric's technique of manipulating 5 sided cubes and using planes with emissions to simulate internal lighting and this is what I came up with.

    ...NOW she looks more like the flying building that she is!

    sak1uey7ez23.jpg
    wg5an2uq6xrd.jpg

    the resulting renders:
    o136xaen1dna.png
    2yjhkqlfv75q.png
    s753l1pjn6rc.png
    7gwvpsi7q19i.png
    7nqur9i8oaby.png
    71bq4ey7vq56.png

    notice how the lighting of the windows changes, depending on what angle that you are looking at it...just like a real life sky scraper in a city at night! :)





    edit: the only issue I see at the moment is that if you look closely enough, you can actually see the reflection of the long, stretched out planes I have in the world background that give the lighting around the starship. Not sure how to deal with that but I won't be using those planes for lighting I don't think when I get to the point in my skill building where I can create HDRI's that give off their own light.
    Post edited by Paul Moechner on
    caveat_imperatorLizzy777evil_genius_180xiaorobearStarshipashleytingerStarCruiserwibblesrspicerscifiericand 1 other.
  • xiaorobearxiaorobear682 Posts: 171Member
    Nice work, those room interior definitely make a big difference. Even better in motion I bet!
    Paul Moechnerscifiericpubliusr
  • Paul MoechnerPaul Moechner541 Posts: 126Member
    edited November 2022 #71
    Day 72. Took a day off from lessons and played around with the lighting. Was able to eliminate the foggyness of the windows in the saucer section by using a darker material. somehow I accidentally used a lighter material for the saucer section rooms vs the rooms in the rest of the ship.

    Then I started to play around with the world lighting to see what happens if the light only came from one side and at an angle and WOW

    m3ayc8tnbe3g.png
    1pmwj2sqb0eg.png

    Post edited by Paul Moechner on
    evil_genius_180Starshipashleytingercaveat_imperatorStarCruiserwibbleLizzy777srspicerscifiericpubliusrand 1 other.
  • evil_genius_180evil_genius_1804256 Posts: 11,034Member
    Looking great. I especially like that dark render, it makes the glows really pop.
    Paul Moechnerscifieric
  • StarshipStarship464 São Paulo - BrasilPosts: 1,976Member
    Good work all around!
    Paul Moechnerscifieric
  • Paul MoechnerPaul Moechner541 Posts: 126Member
    As per lesson 36 of scifieric's tutorial, I added the final details of the back end of the engineering section. Went ahead and added the 3 bulbs inside the big rear light and it made it look a lot better:

    3jkqunbsmvaz.png
    scifiericRory1707ashleytingerevil_genius_180caveat_imperatorStarCruiserwibbleLizzy777JES
  • scifiericscifieric1122 Posts: 1,497Member
    As per lesson 36 of scifieric's tutorial, I added the final details of the back end of the engineering section. Went ahead and added the 3 bulbs inside the big rear light and it made it look a lot better:

    Thank you again for the mention of my tutorial! That's very kind of you.

    You are doing a magnificent job!
    Paul MoechnerTallguy
  • Paul MoechnerPaul Moechner541 Posts: 126Member
    scifieric wrote: »
    As per lesson 36 of scifieric's tutorial, I added the final details of the back end of the engineering section. Went ahead and added the 3 bulbs inside the big rear light and it made it look a lot better:

    Thank you again for the mention of my tutorial! That's very kind of you.

    You are doing a magnificent job!

    Thanks! :)
    scifieric
  • publiusrpubliusr550 Posts: 1,746Member
    I love that “Paul Scale.”

    The largest incarnation of the original Enterprise was from TAS. The 3/4 view seemed to have a longer secondary hull and bigger nacelles. That might be a good next project.
    Paul Moechnerscifieric
  • Paul MoechnerPaul Moechner541 Posts: 126Member
    edited November 2022 #78
    Day 74.

    I'm at the part of the scifieric lessons where I'm learning how to make textures. It took me a couple of days to make this much progress due to me having ZERO experience with textures and almost no experience with Gimp.

    I got the sensor grid lines to look exactly the way I want them to look: very very thin and subtle! Of course this is just the saucer section I got this texture on. I still got to learn to texture the rest of the ship and put the letters and numbers and decals on.

    2pu5wjnrbetl.png
    opiiluct138d.png
    8bd5abck4zcl.png




    Post edited by Paul Moechner on
    wibblescifiericevil_genius_180Rory1707StarCruiserLizzy777caveat_imperatorJES
  • scifiericscifieric1122 Posts: 1,497Member
    That is certainly subtle! Good job!

    They might show up a bit better for us viewers if you had a little stronger lighting. Just a suggestion. Keep up the great work!
    evil_genius_180Paul Moechnerpubliusr
  • Paul MoechnerPaul Moechner541 Posts: 126Member
    edited November 2022 #80
    scifieric wrote: »
    That is certainly subtle! Good job!

    They might show up a bit better for us viewers if you had a little stronger lighting. Just a suggestion. Keep up the great work!

    Thanks for the input! I replaced the 3 images with ones with some slightly stronger lighting. I may have made them too subtle lol
    Post edited by Paul Moechner on
  • Paul MoechnerPaul Moechner541 Posts: 126Member
    edited December 2022 #81
    Day 75:

    Got a lot of work done regarding textures on the top half of the saucer section. Discovered that the modern version of blender has transparency so I got tutoring directly from my fellow AsteronX team members on how to take the texture models I learned to make via scifieric's tutorial, and create textures inside blender with transparent backgrounds.

    Learned a whole lot about how shader nodes work today. Learning shader nodes is a good way to make one's brain hurt if you're a noob to nodes like me haha. Worth it though.

    xlfsenn4vltj.png

    d32yfyijnc6t.jpg

    Post edited by Paul Moechner on
    Rory1707evil_genius_180scifiericStarCruiserLizzy777caveat_imperatorJES
  • evil_genius_180evil_genius_1804256 Posts: 11,034Member
    Looking good. Even after you've had some experience with them, nodes can be a pain. ;)
    Tallguyscifieric
  • Paul MoechnerPaul Moechner541 Posts: 126Member
    edited December 2022 #83
    Day 76. It doesn't look like much difference here but there's a LOT.

    After taking a couple pages worth of notes, and cross referencing what I've been learning about textures from scifieric's tutorials along with some heavy tutoring from fellow AsteronX core team members, especially about nodes, I re-did the textures from scratch a few times over today(10'ish hours worth of work today) until I have all the things I need to learn memorized. I finally got the hang of nodes now.

    I have only finished the top part of the saucer regarding textures. I intentionally didn't do the space dirt or the yellow partial ring because I'm kinda doing my own artistic interpretation of the Enterprise at this point.

    I also finally got it so that there are no grid lines on the side of the saucer, but grid lines on the top and bottom.

    I now officially only have 3 lessons left of scifieric's tutorial!!! WOOT

    3dufourb8yj1.png
    326u9bcj4tcg.png
    b80kf6ije31r.png


    Here's my new set of nodes, if anybody's looking for ideas on how to do shader nodes for something like this on blender version 3.3.1. This is basically me putting a texture on top of a texture, that's on top of another texture, that's on top of yet another texture, haha:
    3e1uvj7spaqw.jpg
    Post edited by Paul Moechner on
    Lizzy777evil_genius_180scifiericWarp Propulsion LaboratoryRory1707StarCruiserCowardJES
  • scifiericscifieric1122 Posts: 1,497Member
    It looks to me like you are doing a MAGNIFICENT job! Well done!
    Paul Moechner
  • Warp Propulsion LaboratoryWarp Propulsion Laboratory913 BrooklynPosts: 322Member
    Took a break from SFM. Came back and saw this. Great work!
    Paul Moechnerscifieric
    Please visit my YouTube channel!
    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqRhLEHgwgTKxsalM5YznYQ


    Formerly furswift
  • ashleytingerashleytinger1998 Central OhioPosts: 1,232Member
    That looks outstanding
    Paul Moechnerscifieric
  • evil_genius_180evil_genius_1804256 Posts: 11,034Member
    I think you really nailed the look of the subtle grid lines. :+1:
    Paul Moechnerscifieric
  • Paul MoechnerPaul Moechner541 Posts: 126Member
    Day 78. Finished ALL the textures for the entire Saucer section. Moving onto other starship sections. Decided to make the two red curved lines on the bottom of the saucer 3d models instead of textures and it worked out.

    2ye96l85n4m4.png
    pby0n3mqubn5.png
    vqfz7rihx7g6.png
    u1ap6fbsljcz.png
    Rory1707caveat_imperatorpubliusrevil_genius_180StarCruiserLizzy777ashleytingerscifieric
  • publiusrpubliusr550 Posts: 1,746Member
    She has a great smile
    scifieric
  • scifiericscifieric1122 Posts: 1,497Member
    Day 78. Finished ALL the textures for the entire Saucer section. Moving onto other starship sections. Decided to make the two red curved lines on the bottom of the saucer 3d models instead of textures and it worked out.

    pby0n3mqubn5.png
    I have to say that the second image in your post (included above) just makes my heart SING! Beautiful work!
    Rory1707Paul Moechner
  • Paul MoechnerPaul Moechner541 Posts: 126Member
    edited December 2022 #91
    I need some help and not sure where on this forum to post this question. Either I can't find the appropriate tutorial online to help me figure this specific issue out, or I don't know the correct vocabulary in which to search for a tutorial to help me with this, so I'll post it here incase someone knows:

    This is the lesson that I'm working on()

    I completed the saucer section part but without creating a UV map and by doing something else entirely.

    I'm currently working on the engineering section right now. This time I followed the instructions as best I could despite the video using an older version of GIMP and Blender. I had to go and take some basic general tutorials on Gimp because I have almost no experience in GIMP. I am now at the point where I did the following:

    1. I sucessfully modeled planes and created a grid for the engineering section like I did with the saucer section and this "grid layer" you see in the below GIMP screenshot has those planes as a PNG layer with a transparency for a background.
    2. I also modeled the red/yellow engineering arm decal and created a PNG with a transparency
    3. I then layered up the two layers(grid and red/yellow decal) on top of a UV map I imported into Gimp
    4. I just finished figuring out how to "scale layers" and got to the point where I FINALLY got them layered up in GIMP

    What do I do next? When I saved my progress in Gimp it saved as something called an xcf but I honestly don't know what to do from here.

    yv03er8y664c.png



    Does anybody know what I'm supposed to do next? My current guess is that I need to delete the blueprint layer since I don't need it anymore to scale and lign things up...and then save this as a png, then somehow treat it as an image texture like I did with the decals for the saucer but that's just a guess.

    What do I do next? Once I figure this part out, texturing the rest of the ship will be simple for me.
    Post edited by Paul Moechner on
    Rory1707Lizzy777scifieric
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