I spent most of the weekend re-doing the neck and stardrive from scratch. Everything between the saucer and the warp pylons is brand new. I spent a lot of time trying to make the join between the neck and secondary hull as solid as I could, which involved no small amount of staring at the screen, trial and error, and refreshing myself on everything from the basics to advanced techniques of subdivision modeling. While it's not perfect, it's substantially better than it was and I'm content to declare victory and move forward.
And here are a couple of renders showcasing the new stardrive:
As usual, click for 1280x720 versions.
On a more boring, technical/organizational note, I also overhauled my file naming scheme so that it's easier to find things. Previously, I had just been incrementally saving files (e.g. ambassador525.blend). Now, I'm splitting it by date and incrementing within each day (e.g. ambassador_2013-01-13.002.blend). I keep all the incremental files for the last week, and then the first and last incremental file for each day thereafter. Until the project is done, at which point I'll probably just keep the final.
Got home late tonight (board game night at work!) and spent some time offering a detailed critique of someone's work on another forum, so not a lot to show this evening. I spent some time cleaning up the impulse unit, which I forgot to freeze along with the rest of the stardrive. :rolleyes: Saved a fair few polygons by doing that, especially with the three thruster units within the impulse housing. I also finally put in the detail that flanks the impulse unit. The white square is the same as those on the "roof" of B deck.
I spent most of the weekend re-doing the neck and stardrive from scratch. Everything between the saucer and the warp pylons is brand new. I spent a lot of time trying to make the join between the neck and secondary hull as solid as I could, which involved no small amount of staring at the screen, trial and error, and refreshing myself on everything from the basics to advanced techniques of subdivision modeling. While it's not perfect, it's substantially better than it was and I'm content to declare victory and move forward.
The geometry looks much better and clean, congrats!
But... excuse me to be a pain, but looking at the wires, the front looks "fat" and the deflector small than it would be. Therefore, the rendering with lights donAât leaves it so perceptible.
Take a look at these refs: http://drexfiles.wordpress.com/2009/02/01/enterprise-c-pictorial-deluxe/comment-page-1/. I know itAâs the Yamagushi, but just the deflector makes her different from the "C". The hullAâs shape is the same.
But... excuse me to be a pain, but looking at the wires, the front looks "fat" and the deflector small than it would be. Therefore, the rendering with lights donAât leaves it so perceptible.
Take a look at these refs: http://drexfiles.wordpress.com/2009/02/01/enterprise-c-pictorial-deluxe/comment-page-1/. I know itAâs the Yamagushi, but just the deflector makes her different from the "C". The hullAâs shape is the same.
There are a couple of misleading things about this screenshot.
First, it uses orthographic projection, which throws all perception of the proportions out of whack. That's almost certainly contributing to part of why it looks "fat."
Second, what you're seeing in this screenshot isn't actually the deflector, but the emitter behind the deflector. There's another object that sits just behind the lip of the deflector housing which is semi-transparent, much the same way I set up the Bussard collectors and impulse engines. The white part in the middle of the deflector recess that's part of the model is a bright white emitter, while the blue part is a highly-reflective surface to bounce the light around inside this area. The actual semi-transparent blue disc is what you end up seeing in the renders.
Also, in the last full-ship render I did, I had switched light transmission through transparent surfaces off, so none of the blue deflector glow was showing through. :runs:
Here's that same shot, re-rendered with it enabled, and placed side-by-side with the previous version to compare the difference.
Got home late tonight (board game night at work!) and spent some time offering a detailed critique of someone's work on another forum, so not a lot to show this evening.
I'm sure that your evening was a lot more productive than mine was. I was up until the wee hours of the morning bashing in a terminal trying to make something work in Linux and ending up with no results to show for my hours of work. :rolleyes:
There are a couple of misleading things about this screenshot.
First, it uses orthographic projection, which throws all perception of the proportions out of whack. That's almost certainly contributing to part of why it looks "fat."
Second, what you're seeing in this screenshot isn't actually the deflector, but the emitter behind the deflector.
I'm sure that your evening was a lot more productive than mine was. I was up until the wee hours of the morning bashing in a terminal trying to make something work in Linux and ending up with no results to show for my hours of work. :rolleyes:
Beats me. I'm trying to get Lightwave working in Linux, but the issue is getting the dongle to work. It involves compiling Wine with USB support and copying Windows drivers and whatnot. I think I had the wrong driver files on my last 32-bit attempt and 64-bit is nearly a lost cause because compiling 64-bit Wine doesn't go so well. (I can compile 64-bit but not 32-bit on a 64-bit system and therein lies the problem) I'm going to have another go at it later, but I think I'm going to try on my laptop. I'm getting tired of reinstalling Linux on my desktop after I make a mess of things.
Beats me. I'm trying to get Lightwave working in Linux, but the issue is getting the dongle to work. It involves compiling Wine with USB support and copying Windows drivers and whatnot. I think I had the wrong driver files on my last 32-bit attempt and 64-bit is nearly a lost cause because compiling 64-bit Wine doesn't go so well. (I can compile 64-bit but not 32-bit on a 64-bit system and therein lies the problem) I'm going to have another go at it later, but I think I'm going to try on my laptop. I'm getting tired of reinstalling Linux on my desktop after I make a mess of things.
Ah, yeah, that sounds like the sort of thing that I'd only be able to help with if I had my own copy of LightWave to experiment with locally. Sorry.
Tonight was very productive, but not in a way that's especially visible. I'll lead off with the meager visible stuff: the spine is now in place and ready for detailing, and I decided to make the connection between the spine and the impulse housing more heatsink-type stuff.
The rest of the evening went into planning the shield grids for the stardrive. I only have five images that are big enough to discern enough detail about the stardrive shield grids. The blue grid pattern doesn't represent the entirety of the shield grid, though it does overlay much of it. After a lot of squinting, guessing, and trial-and-error, I came up with the following pattern that I think I'm fairly happy with.
Thoughts? Any obvious issues? Any less obvious issues?
Ah, yeah, that sounds like the sort of thing that I'd only be able to help with if I had my own copy of LightWave to experiment with locally. Sorry.
It's no biggie. I have Windows 7 that I paid over $100 for, I may as well keep on using it. I just thought it would be cool, but it's turning out to not be worth the aggravation. The sad thing is, I'm following every instruction that I've been able to find on enabling and using USB in Wine and it's not working. So, there has to be something that I don't know about, a command or something, and I could spend the rest of my life trying to figure it out and not do so. So, screw it.
Okay, here's the layout cut into the hull. Each individual grid square is colorized so that I can easily select a batch of them and offset them together.
This is basically the Point of No Return, so I want to make sure this looks good before I start putting the grids in for real. I think I'll sit on this for tonight (and see if anyone has any thoughts!) and resume work on it tomorrow. I'm not especially worried about the upper two and lower two grid "rows" having larger/different shapes than the middle two. I think it makes the shape more interesting. Of course, if folks disagree, I'd like to know that, too!
Starship, I switched these to perspective rather than orthographic.
Point of no return? Don't you have your project saved in stages so that, if you mess up, you can go back to an earlier stage and not back to the beginning? (that's what I do ) I always save before doing grid lines because it's such a fickle operation.
Starship, I switched these to perspective rather than orthographic.
Thank you gentleman! :thumb:
IAâm taking notes about your work all the time. For sure IAâll addopt similar sollutions for my Apollo Class, when the time comes.
I do like of your layout for the grids. Fits very well and minimizes headtaches when cutting them over the hull. I have just one suggestion, which is to move a bit down the ending of the blue grid. Like showed in the sketch attached.
Point of no return? Don't you have your project saved in stages so that, if you mess up, you can go back to an earlier stage and not back to the beginning? (that's what I do ) I always save before doing grid lines because it's such a fickle operation.
Certainly. I have hundreds of iterative save files, in fact. That doesn't mean I want to re-do the grids over and over again. I did that often enough on the saucer already.
IAâm taking notes about your work all the time. For sure IAâll addopt similar sollutions for my Apollo Class, when the time comes.
That's very kind of you to say! Hopefully you're noting all the places I screw up along with whatever it is I do right. With as much time as I've sunk into this model so far (up to 215 hours, with 184 of that in Blender), there's a lot of screwing up to be learned from.
I do like of your layout for the grids. Fits very well and minimizes headtaches when cutting them over the hull. I have just one suggestion, which is to move a bit down the ending of the blue grid. Like showed in the sketch attached.
Aha! I think this time the perspective is playing tricks on the eye. When I first saw your shot, I thought, "Wow, how did the grid get so distorted there? Isn't that supposed to be one of the straight ones?" Sure enough, it is! Here's the orthographic side view to clarify things:
...Aha! I think this time the perspective is playing tricks on the eye. When I first saw your shot, I thought, "Wow, how did the grid get so distorted there? Isn't that supposed to be one of the straight ones?" Sure enough, it is!
Dammit! IAâm getting old... I need my glasses!!!
.
.
.
.
Wait... I already have glasses... Oh ****!! I need a new one!
Took six total hours to do, but the shield grids are now finally in place on the secondary hull!
Other than the shield grids on the neck and the secondary hull and neck windows, this was the last bit of truly tedious detailing that remained of this magnitude. The neck grids are a much smaller set, and cleaning up window booleans is, while tedious, a lot more predictable. Everything else is specific detailing, which means I get to be creative and have fun!
Have you figured out the window pattern for the secondary hull? I've noticed none of the fan-made blueprints are accurate when it comes to those.
Not yet. I'm going to ignore the fan-made blueprints and stick to the reference images of the studio model as much as it makes sense to, given the deck layout I'm using. The result is likely to have individual decks matching the window cluster pattern on the studio model, but the specific number of rows and where those rows start and end might vary.
You know always wanted to have a crack at something from Star Trek, but there are just so many of you guys out there already doing it great justice great work mate!
You know always wanted to have a crack at something from Star Trek, but there are just so many of you guys out there already doing it great justice great work mate!
You know always wanted to have a crack at something from Star Trek, but there are just so many of you guys out there already doing it great justice great work mate!
What evil_genius_180 said! One of the great things about a forum like this is that there are so many different takes on the same design. Back when I started posting this WIP, there were a bunch of other Ambassadors in progress, too. It was great to see the different directions everyone took with different features! Don't let saturation dissuade you from trying your hand at something.
Well, I was going to work on the windows, but while studying my references, I realized I'd made a rather egregious error: I had made the bottom of the neck inset taper far too close to the secondary hull! Cue an evening of going back to my subdivision cage and retooling the neck again. Once I was happy with it, I had to marry the new topology to the old secondary hull (because I sure wasn't going to re-do those grid lines!). The end result, fortunately, ended up looking a lot better than the original version anyway!
I turned AO on for this render, hence why it's so much brighter than previous renders. Wanted to better show the surface detail. And just to add something new, I also put in the major ribs on the neck. Still need to put in the ribs that go on the front of the neck.
I based this pattern on what I could discern from the closest reference image I have of the neck area on the Yamaguchi variant, adjusted to synchronize with the grid pattern on my secondary hull and my internal deck layout. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. None of the neck grids cross a deck, so windows should fit in between all of those horizontal lines nicely.
I still need to put the aft-facing windows in before I can declare total victory here, but there are fortunately few of them and it's a very regular surface back there, so it shouldn't be too painful.
Turned the AO back off for this one, since I wanted to showcase the internal illumination. Going to need to play with increasing the overall light level of the scene and then scaling it back as a post-process, I think. Cycles functions better with more light (much like an actual camera, really).
Posts
My laptop has AMD graphics, but I also don't use it for much. This is my CGI machine. (and my main gaming machine)
I spent most of the weekend re-doing the neck and stardrive from scratch. Everything between the saucer and the warp pylons is brand new. I spent a lot of time trying to make the join between the neck and secondary hull as solid as I could, which involved no small amount of staring at the screen, trial and error, and refreshing myself on everything from the basics to advanced techniques of subdivision modeling. While it's not perfect, it's substantially better than it was and I'm content to declare victory and move forward.
And here are a couple of renders showcasing the new stardrive:
As usual, click for 1280x720 versions.
On a more boring, technical/organizational note, I also overhauled my file naming scheme so that it's easier to find things. Previously, I had just been incrementally saving files (e.g. ambassador525.blend). Now, I'm splitting it by date and incrementing within each day (e.g. ambassador_2013-01-13.002.blend). I keep all the incremental files for the last week, and then the first and last incremental file for each day thereafter. Until the project is done, at which point I'll probably just keep the final.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Got home late tonight (board game night at work!) and spent some time offering a detailed critique of someone's work on another forum, so not a lot to show this evening. I spent some time cleaning up the impulse unit, which I forgot to freeze along with the rest of the stardrive. :rolleyes: Saved a fair few polygons by doing that, especially with the three thruster units within the impulse housing. I also finally put in the detail that flanks the impulse unit. The white square is the same as those on the "roof" of B deck.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
The geometry looks much better and clean, congrats!
But... excuse me to be a pain, but looking at the wires, the front looks "fat" and the deflector small than it would be. Therefore, the rendering with lights donAât leaves it so perceptible.
Take a look at these refs: http://drexfiles.wordpress.com/2009/02/01/enterprise-c-pictorial-deluxe/comment-page-1/. I know itAâs the Yamagushi, but just the deflector makes her different from the "C". The hullAâs shape is the same.
There are a couple of misleading things about this screenshot.
First, it uses orthographic projection, which throws all perception of the proportions out of whack. That's almost certainly contributing to part of why it looks "fat."
Second, what you're seeing in this screenshot isn't actually the deflector, but the emitter behind the deflector. There's another object that sits just behind the lip of the deflector housing which is semi-transparent, much the same way I set up the Bussard collectors and impulse engines. The white part in the middle of the deflector recess that's part of the model is a bright white emitter, while the blue part is a highly-reflective surface to bounce the light around inside this area. The actual semi-transparent blue disc is what you end up seeing in the renders.
Also, in the last full-ship render I did, I had switched light transmission through transparent surfaces off, so none of the blue deflector glow was showing through. :runs:
Here's that same shot, re-rendered with it enabled, and placed side-by-side with the previous version to compare the difference.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
I'm sure that your evening was a lot more productive than mine was. I was up until the wee hours of the morning bashing in a terminal trying to make something work in Linux and ending up with no results to show for my hours of work. :rolleyes:
Now I see.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Beats me. I'm trying to get Lightwave working in Linux, but the issue is getting the dongle to work. It involves compiling Wine with USB support and copying Windows drivers and whatnot. I think I had the wrong driver files on my last 32-bit attempt and 64-bit is nearly a lost cause because compiling 64-bit Wine doesn't go so well. (I can compile 64-bit but not 32-bit on a 64-bit system and therein lies the problem) I'm going to have another go at it later, but I think I'm going to try on my laptop. I'm getting tired of reinstalling Linux on my desktop after I make a mess of things.
Tonight was very productive, but not in a way that's especially visible. I'll lead off with the meager visible stuff: the spine is now in place and ready for detailing, and I decided to make the connection between the spine and the impulse housing more heatsink-type stuff.
The rest of the evening went into planning the shield grids for the stardrive. I only have five images that are big enough to discern enough detail about the stardrive shield grids. The blue grid pattern doesn't represent the entirety of the shield grid, though it does overlay much of it. After a lot of squinting, guessing, and trial-and-error, I came up with the following pattern that I think I'm fairly happy with.
Thoughts? Any obvious issues? Any less obvious issues?
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
It's no biggie. I have Windows 7 that I paid over $100 for, I may as well keep on using it. I just thought it would be cool, but it's turning out to not be worth the aggravation. The sad thing is, I'm following every instruction that I've been able to find on enabling and using USB in Wine and it's not working. So, there has to be something that I don't know about, a command or something, and I could spend the rest of my life trying to figure it out and not do so. So, screw it.
This is basically the Point of No Return, so I want to make sure this looks good before I start putting the grids in for real. I think I'll sit on this for tonight (and see if anyone has any thoughts!) and resume work on it tomorrow. I'm not especially worried about the upper two and lower two grid "rows" having larger/different shapes than the middle two. I think it makes the shape more interesting. Of course, if folks disagree, I'd like to know that, too!
Starship, I switched these to perspective rather than orthographic.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Thank you gentleman! :thumb:
IAâm taking notes about your work all the time. For sure IAâll addopt similar sollutions for my Apollo Class, when the time comes.
I do like of your layout for the grids. Fits very well and minimizes headtaches when cutting them over the hull. I have just one suggestion, which is to move a bit down the ending of the blue grid. Like showed in the sketch attached.
That's very kind of you to say! Hopefully you're noting all the places I screw up along with whatever it is I do right. With as much time as I've sunk into this model so far (up to 215 hours, with 184 of that in Blender), there's a lot of screwing up to be learned from.
Aha! I think this time the perspective is playing tricks on the eye. When I first saw your shot, I thought, "Wow, how did the grid get so distorted there? Isn't that supposed to be one of the straight ones?" Sure enough, it is! Here's the orthographic side view to clarify things:
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Dammit! IAâm getting old... I need my glasses!!!
.
.
.
.
Wait... I already have glasses... Oh ****!! I need a new one!
Other than the shield grids on the neck and the secondary hull and neck windows, this was the last bit of truly tedious detailing that remained of this magnitude. The neck grids are a much smaller set, and cleaning up window booleans is, while tedious, a lot more predictable. Everything else is specific detailing, which means I get to be creative and have fun!
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Have you figured out the window pattern for the secondary hull? I've noticed none of the fan-made blueprints are accurate when it comes to those.
Not yet. I'm going to ignore the fan-made blueprints and stick to the reference images of the studio model as much as it makes sense to, given the deck layout I'm using. The result is likely to have individual decks matching the window cluster pattern on the studio model, but the specific number of rows and where those rows start and end might vary.
Also, there will be an arboretum! :cool:
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
That's no reason to not do it.
What evil_genius_180 said! One of the great things about a forum like this is that there are so many different takes on the same design. Back when I started posting this WIP, there were a bunch of other Ambassadors in progress, too. It was great to see the different directions everyone took with different features! Don't let saturation dissuade you from trying your hand at something.
Well, I was going to work on the windows, but while studying my references, I realized I'd made a rather egregious error: I had made the bottom of the neck inset taper far too close to the secondary hull! Cue an evening of going back to my subdivision cage and retooling the neck again. Once I was happy with it, I had to marry the new topology to the old secondary hull (because I sure wasn't going to re-do those grid lines!). The end result, fortunately, ended up looking a lot better than the original version anyway!
I turned AO on for this render, hence why it's so much brighter than previous renders. Wanted to better show the surface detail. And just to add something new, I also put in the major ribs on the neck. Still need to put in the ribs that go on the front of the neck.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Shield grids on the neck!
I based this pattern on what I could discern from the closest reference image I have of the neck area on the Yamaguchi variant, adjusted to synchronize with the grid pattern on my secondary hull and my internal deck layout. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
I still need to put the aft-facing windows in before I can declare total victory here, but there are fortunately few of them and it's a very regular surface back there, so it shouldn't be too painful.
Turned the AO back off for this one, since I wanted to showcase the internal illumination. Going to need to play with increasing the overall light level of the scene and then scaling it back as a post-process, I think. Cycles functions better with more light (much like an actual camera, really).
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog