I know! It's crazy! I don't think I've ever properly finished a model. Ever. I think I can attribute it to medication changes 🤣
Are you sure they didn't just transfer your brain into the body of a robot that makes awesome models? I mean, those secondary hull textures are on point. I only built this ship once, about 8 years ago, and it took me a long time to get that pattern right.
Are you sure they didn't just transfer your brain into the body of a robot that makes awesome models? I mean, those secondary hull textures are on point. I only built this ship once, about 8 years ago, and it took me a long time to get that pattern right.
🤣 What textures? Hahaha when I set out to make this model I wanted to try to do it all with procedural shaders and geometry. Today I did a lot of drawing with the knife tool and tweaking shaders. And I only had to do 1/4th of the two sections at the front and mirrored them around. Lots of use of the shrink wrap modifier as well. I duplicate the section from the main piece that I want the texture to be on, scale up a little, and then shrink wrap it back to the main part. And then I look at my reference and use the knife tool to cut the shapes and I just work from one side to the other and as I go I assign each shape it's specific shader.
For the windows I'm going to take some circles and planes make them the shape of the various windows, then arrange them over the reference images that I have in each orthographic view, join them all together and shrink wrap them to the main hull pieces and set the offset to be just below the surface, duplicate the window object and solidify it and use that to boolean the windows out of the main hull piece and use the shrink wrapped planes to use as the window glass. Gotta make sure to apply the shrink wrap for the window glass before cutting the windows or they won't have a surface to shrink onto!
Also shout out to Hard Ops! Very useful blender add on!
I just noticed the clipping on the pennant in the last pic. Starboard side was fixed but I copied instead of mirrored. Middle pic is after the fix, since the pics were added out of order.
it's got WAY MORE functionality than I've used so far. I mostly use the Sharpen and Mark Sharp tools. Makes subd modeling go a lot faster when I don't have to mess with the crease settings in the tool panel. I can just hit the hotkey and it's the first option in the menu.
🤣 What textures? Hahaha when I set out to make this model I wanted to try to do it all with procedural shaders and geometry. Today I did a lot of drawing with the knife tool and tweaking shaders. And I only had to do 1/4th of the two sections at the front and mirrored them around. Lots of use of the shrink wrap modifier as well. I duplicate the section from the main piece that I want the texture to be on, scale up a little, and then shrink wrap it back to the main part. And then I look at my reference and use the knife tool to cut the shapes and I just work from one side to the other and as I go I assign each shape it's specific shader.
For the windows I'm going to take some circles and planes make them the shape of the various windows, then arrange them over the reference images that I have in each orthographic view, join them all together and shrink wrap them to the main hull pieces and set the offset to be just below the surface, duplicate the window object and solidify it and use that to boolean the windows out of the main hull piece and use the shrink wrapped planes to use as the window glass. Gotta make sure to apply the shrink wrap for the window glass before cutting the windows or they won't have a surface to shrink onto!
Also shout out to Hard Ops! Very useful blender add on!
Very smart. You saved yourself a lot of time. I spent a long time just drawing things in Inkscape, exporting that to an image, trying it on my model, seeing where it wasn't where I wanted it to be, then going back to Inkscape for tweaks. Rinse, repeat. You cut out the middle man, so to speak, by just drawing everything in Blender.
Would a Fresnel node help? You could mix between a not-super-colorific reflection on straight-on angles, and blend in the colorific specular highlighting at angles. The brick texture should also very slightly affect the base color (lighter and darker by fractions) as the brain gets kinda confused by these equal luminance color differences.
Also, this is more for blender.org not you... shouldn't the thing you are trying with the interference paint be entirely in the clear coat? It'd be good if that was a channel you could pipe color to instead of just a value.
Last suggestion is since its space, much sharper shadows (perhaps a sun light, set to 5700k blackbody, and the equivalent of 1 kw /ms^2 at your scale) and dial the chromatic aberration/lens distortion back to just barely perceptible.
I did use a Layer Weight node set to Fresnel, but I had it disabled for a while since it made the effect so subtle that I couldn't really see what my adjustments were doing. Haha.
Also, took me a heck of a time to figure out why the registry was still casting a shadow when I had it disabled. Turns out I had to disable Glossy as well. It was showing up on the hull texture as a reflection, not a shadow, and I couldn't set the shrinkwrap any closer without clipping.
I did use a Layer Weight node set to Fresnel, but I had it disabled for a while since it made the effect so subtle that I couldn't really see what my adjustments were doing. Haha.
Also, took me a heck of a time to figure out why the registry was still casting a shadow when I had it disabled. Turns out I had to disable Glossy as well. It was showing up on the hull texture as a reflection, not a shadow, and I couldn't set the shrinkwrap any closer without clipping.
@backstept This is some amazing work! Could you talk a little bit about how you're lighting your scene? It's beautifully lit, very gentle without harsh contrast. I love it.
@backstept This is some amazing work! Could you talk a little bit about how you're lighting your scene? It's beautifully lit, very gentle without harsh contrast. I love it.
Earlier renders were just with a few sun lamps. Some in the middle I used a hdr that comes with blender, 'studio.exr' I was looking at viewport render options and saw the studio setup as one of the world options and I thought it looked pretty nice. The later ones were with a hdr that I made using Nebula Generator and one sun lamp with a 5° angle for slighly softer shadows.
That looks gorgeous. Very accurate to how it's lit in the first movie.
Thanks!
I'm finding myself becoming a bit of a TMP purist where the Enterprise is concerned, what with all the repaints and simplification of lighting in the later films.
Me too. Visually, it's the absolute best of the TOS films, in my opinion. In fact, the older I get, the more I like that film and it's really close to being my favorite. ILM really ruined the look of the ship by applying all of that transparent duller to take down those gorgeous reflections because they insisted on using blue screens, as opposed to shooting it against black, as designed. And that was actually the less egregious of the repaints. The repaint I approve of most is the one for Star Trek VI, where they at least tried to be faithful to the original. But the colors still didn't wind up being the same and the ship still wasn't as shiny as it should have been.
I also agree on the lighting. I found ILM's lighting to be more "meh" in general to TMP. Instead of making use of the fantastically designed self lighting, they used less and less spot lights as the movies progressed and went back to the more TV style lighting that indicated that there was always a strong light source (star) nearby to light the ship.
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Are you sure they didn't just transfer your brain into the body of a robot that makes awesome models? I mean, those secondary hull textures are on point. I only built this ship once, about 8 years ago, and it took me a long time to get that pattern right.
🤣 What textures? Hahaha when I set out to make this model I wanted to try to do it all with procedural shaders and geometry. Today I did a lot of drawing with the knife tool and tweaking shaders. And I only had to do 1/4th of the two sections at the front and mirrored them around. Lots of use of the shrink wrap modifier as well. I duplicate the section from the main piece that I want the texture to be on, scale up a little, and then shrink wrap it back to the main part. And then I look at my reference and use the knife tool to cut the shapes and I just work from one side to the other and as I go I assign each shape it's specific shader.
For the windows I'm going to take some circles and planes make them the shape of the various windows, then arrange them over the reference images that I have in each orthographic view, join them all together and shrink wrap them to the main hull pieces and set the offset to be just below the surface, duplicate the window object and solidify it and use that to boolean the windows out of the main hull piece and use the shrink wrapped planes to use as the window glass. Gotta make sure to apply the shrink wrap for the window glass before cutting the windows or they won't have a surface to shrink onto!
Also shout out to Hard Ops! Very useful blender add on!
Various Work: U.S.S. Constellation - Matt Jefferies Concept Shuttle
Very smart. You saved yourself a lot of time. I spent a long time just drawing things in Inkscape, exporting that to an image, trying it on my model, seeing where it wasn't where I wanted it to be, then going back to Inkscape for tweaks. Rinse, repeat. You cut out the middle man, so to speak, by just drawing everything in Blender.
Various Work: U.S.S. Constellation - Matt Jefferies Concept Shuttle
Various Work: U.S.S. Constellation - Matt Jefferies Concept Shuttle
Fun fact: this 4K image is 20mb larger than the blend file it was rendered from.
Nice!
Also, this is more for blender.org not you... shouldn't the thing you are trying with the interference paint be entirely in the clear coat? It'd be good if that was a channel you could pipe color to instead of just a value.
Last suggestion is since its space, much sharper shadows (perhaps a sun light, set to 5700k blackbody, and the equivalent of 1 kw /ms^2 at your scale) and dial the chromatic aberration/lens distortion back to just barely perceptible.
But otherwise, incredible!
Also, took me a heck of a time to figure out why the registry was still casting a shadow when I had it disabled. Turns out I had to disable Glossy as well. It was showing up on the hull texture as a reflection, not a shadow, and I couldn't set the shrinkwrap any closer without clipping.
Also, also, I started roughing in a shuttlebay.
I love the rear shot, the second from the top!
Oh man, beautiful work!
and with lights inside
Thanks!
I'm finding myself becoming a bit of a TMP purist where the Enterprise is concerned, what with all the repaints and simplification of lighting in the later films.
I also agree on the lighting. I found ILM's lighting to be more "meh" in general to TMP. Instead of making use of the fantastically designed self lighting, they used less and less spot lights as the movies progressed and went back to the more TV style lighting that indicated that there was always a strong light source (star) nearby to light the ship.
Oh man, pretty!