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3DTOS Constitution Reboot (Finished)

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  • BorklessBorkless171 Posts: 0Member
    Hunter G wrote: »
    I'm tempted to put another set of launchers on top of the saucer, and a pair on the bottom aft section of the engineering hull, since the current locations don't give much coverage. But I also don't want to turn the Connie into a warship. Your thoughts?
    The coverage is better than you'd think, as torpedoes are homing warheads. The instant they clear the hull, the torpedo itself can twist and turn to hit whatever you tell it to (assuming there's no jamming/target isn't flying like a maniac, etc).

    Modern missile destroyers don't even bother with amiable tubes. Their missiles are stored upright, launched vertically, then roll over to acquire their targets, so what you have here would be fine.

    Speaking of what you have here, very nice reboot. Looking nice and sleek. The busards in particular look exceedingly cool.
  • Judge Death.Judge Death.1 Posts: 0Member
    Another issue re coverage is that in space ships can turn in any direction, rotate, pitch, yaw, etc. So you're not like a navy ship limited to moving in re to the surface or even an aricraft that can't turn towards the ground too long, you can turn the ship to beat on any target, a slight role along the forward axis could bring weapons to bear that normally could not.
  • Hunter GHunter G1905 Posts: 543Member
    Yeah, I totally forgot that torpedoes can turn, duh! As for having a rear launcher, I was thinking about situations where there are more than one enemy ship. Plus you're right about the ship turning quickly as well. Speaking of, it kind of needs thrusters! I'll be working on those after my computer is done rendering another full view image. It should be finished within the next hour and a half.

    p.s. I love the new version of Blender. It has options to eliminate noise, and I'm so happy! :)
  • Judge Death.Judge Death.1 Posts: 0Member
    Uh, could you fill me in on those anti noise options a little? Must have missed that part of the FAQ.
  • Hunter GHunter G1905 Posts: 543Member
    edited May 2020 #156
    Uh, could you fill me in on those anti noise options a little? Must have missed that part of the FAQ.

    Sure thing. The new options are clamp and filter glossy. Clamp is located under the "Sampling" tab, and the filter glossy is under the "Light Paths" tab. Currently for my model I have both set at .5, but as always you just have to experiment. As you can see from my latest renders, It does a lot. This one was rendered at only 900 samples:
    YQUTtKv.png
    My other ones were sitting at 2000 samples, and they were still fairly noisy after photo-shopping them, which also blurred them to much. :lol:
    Post edited by Hunter G on
    JES
  • Judge Death.Judge Death.1 Posts: 0Member
    Thanks.

    "Only" 900 samples?!?! Damn, I thought I was going all out at 350....

    BTW, if you ever animate this, mess with people's eyes by having the internal rings on the bussard collectors rotating in different directions, as in the outer ring rotates right and the inner one rotates left. Flip it over for the other nacelle.

    ALso,what I like about your connie, and my favorite connie reboot, the GK gabriel version, is that you have machinery behind the bussard intakes. I like that. The original enterprise, or at least the revised one that got into the series, had the blurred spinning lights behind the opaque nacelle caps, later versions just had red lights if anything. You have visible, discernable machinery there and I like it just like I like it on my favorite connie reboot.

    Also you didn't get dumb and do it like the turbofan blades on the fhawdawful JJA version.
  • al3dal3d177 Posts: 0Member
    Really like your adaptation so far kiddo...but i'de like to see real size renders..:)...
  • McCMcC373 Posts: 704Member
    al3d: right-click on the image and open it in a new tab. The forum down-sizes images that would break the thread borders. The actual images are quite large.

    Hunter G: Clamp and Filter Glossy have been around for a while, actually. Perhaps they improved their performance?

    Judge Death.: Sample count depends on light complexity, really. The more light variance you have in your scene, the more samples you're likely to need. Hunter's been doing very high-contrast renders, which require more sampling (especially for the darker areas, where noise tends to be more noticeable), compared to the ones you've been doing, which have all been pretty evenly lit. For my Ambassador renders, because of the wide contrast between the key light and every other light, and also because of the number of light-emitting surfaces, I typically render at 2800 samples or more (prior to tweaking the light rig a bit, I was rendering at 4000!). Given the results Hunter's getting with tweaking Clamp and Filter Glossy, though, I think I might need to futz with my settings some. ;)

    Ship's looking gorgeous! :D
  • al3dal3d177 Posts: 0Member
    OH..ahaha..Thanks McC...

    SO..what's the plan for the paint work on this baby?
  • Hunter GHunter G1905 Posts: 543Member
    =McC;567787]al3d: right-click on the image and open it in a new tab. The forum down-sizes images that would break the thread borders. The actual images are quite large.

    Hunter G: Clamp and Filter Glossy have been around for a while, actually. Perhaps they improved their performance?

    Judge Death.: Sample count depends on light complexity, really. The more light variance you have in your scene, the more samples you're likely to need. Hunter's been doing very high-contrast renders, which require more sampling (especially for the darker areas, where noise tends to be more noticeable), compared to the ones you've been doing, which have all been pretty evenly lit. For my Ambassador renders, because of the wide contrast between the key light and every other light, and also because of the number of light-emitting surfaces, I typically render at 2800 samples or more (prior to tweaking the light rig a bit, I was rendering at 4000!). Given the results Hunter's getting with tweaking Clamp and Filter Glossy, though, I think I might need to futz with my settings some. ;)

    thanks for clearing all that up so I didn't have to! BTW I never noticed those options in previous versions, maybe they were in a different place?

    =al3d;SO..what's the plan for the paint work on this baby?

    I'll start texturing when I finish the model. I haven't worked with textures very much, so it's going to be a pain!

    In the meantime, I'm trying to figure out how to single out the glowing parts in the bussards to make the glare a lot brighter. I've tried using object index, material index, and the emission pass, but none work because the lights are behind a transparent dome. I'll try increasing the transparency a little to see if that works.
  • Hunter GHunter G1905 Posts: 543Member
    edited May 2020 #162
    Ok, I found out why I had to use the compositor to brighten up the image (which I forgot to mention earlier). It was the clamp option. Now I've turned that up to 3.5 and the filter glossy up to 10. The results of the lights are a lot better now, even though the rest is a little bit more noisy. I figure that once I get the textures on, you won't notice the noise as much.

    U5qjuIe.png
    Post edited by Hunter G on
  • Judge Death.Judge Death.1 Posts: 0Member
    Nice looking, but are you married to those 4 angular depressions in the upper saucer? I'm not big on them personally. What are they for? I's probably go with a smoother upper saucer. Then again I may not be seeing them from a great angle, do you have othe rangle views of them?
  • Hunter GHunter G1905 Posts: 543Member
    edited May 2020 #164
    Nice looking, but are you married to those 4 angular depressions in the upper saucer? I'm not big on them personally. What are they for? I's probably go with a smoother upper saucer. Then again I may not be seeing them from a great angle, do you have othe rangle views of them?

    Yes, I am "married" to them, heh heh, mostly because doing away with them will mean redoing the saucer, and in turn redoing the grid, which is not a fun thought! Personally, I have no idea what they're for, but they're on the original model. I'm assuming they're some kind of test bed technology, which would explain them not showing up on the refit.

    As for another angle, will a screenshot do?
    oL1SIUa.png
    Post edited by Hunter G on
    JES
  • Judge Death.Judge Death.1 Posts: 0Member
    Hmm, I never noticed them on the original enterprise.
  • RekkertRekkert4037 Buenos Aires, ArgentinaPosts: 2,302Member
    Hunter G wrote: »
    Personally, I have no idea what they're for, but they're on the original model. I'm assuming they're some kind of test bed technology, which would explain them not showing up on the refit.

    I always assumed they were some sort of RCS thrusters, but that's just my own speculation.
    For all my finished Trek fan art, please visit my portfolio
  • TrekMDTrekMD192 Posts: 639Member
    Nice take on the old girl.
  • McCMcC373 Posts: 704Member
    Man, that's a really pretty render. Every time you post a new shot, I love this project a little bit more.
  • Hunter GHunter G1905 Posts: 543Member
    Thanks guys!

    OK, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that I just figured out a technique for modeling panels that was right in front of me the whole time. The bad news is, this would mean starting over again. Some advantages to starting over would be that it will be a lot easier to texture, and it would cut down on polygons. What do you think about that?
  • Judge Death.Judge Death.1 Posts: 0Member
    hell, I had to start over a lot on my ship as I discovered better techniques. If you want it to look it's best sometimes you need to do it.
  • McCMcC373 Posts: 704Member
    If I realize some element can be done better and don't do it, it never stops bugging me. I re-did the saucer gridlines on my Ambassador three times, redid some of the windows three or four, rebuilt the nacelles two or three times, rebuilt the stardrive cage two or three times...

    It's made the project take forever, but each time improved the model and I was glad I did it.

    If you think you might feel the same way, then you have your answer. ;)
  • Hunter GHunter G1905 Posts: 543Member
    Thank you for the opinions. It sound like I'll be starting over again! I'm going to take this opportunity to take a break from Blender for a while, and take those extra classes I've been putting off. So I guess you won't see any updates for a while. And that's that. :cool:
  • SaquistSaquist1 Posts: 0Member
    Constitution Class never had grooves of this sort in the hull. Rather these locations had luminous squares at inter-cardinal directions from the bow and stern of of the saucer. The original model didn't have them but the more well known rendition did but they were smooth on the saucer as far as I can tell.

    My best guess is that they are sensor palettes like the round glowing sensors at the bow of the saucer. This makes sense if the main deflector could sense conically downward from the ship but is blocked by the saucer sweeping upward.
  • BCBC0 Posts: 0Member
    So good it makes me weep in envy...

    As to photon torpedoes, the original design had them below the bridge. The movie version made sense in moving them to the engineering hull since photon torpedoes use anti matter and the AM is stored in the engineering hull. In the event of separation the tubes in the saucer would be useless wastes of space mostly.

    I don't know if the ship needs to bristle with weapons, as apparently a TOS connie could devastate a planet with her 'mere' 6 phasers and 4 torpedo tubes, the weapons could be so powerful you don't need a lot. (Operation annihilate and a taste of armageddon both stated a connie could pretty much take out a world in terms of cities, installations or even all life if need be.)

    I would remount the tubes into the rear hull unless you say they double as probe launchers or something similar.

    The original design lacked rearward firepower, but realistically in space no one can really 'sneak up on you from behind' at least until the cloaking device was invented. The enterprise had pretty awesome sensors, it may have been felt rear firepower was not needed due to sensors keeping things from sneaking up on you from behind. After the cloak was developed they may have added some rear weapons. Hence the reliant, rear tubes on klingon battlecruisers, etc.

    The original TOS Enterprise had antimatter in the saucer too, just not as much. According to "The Making of Star Trek" the impulse drives were originally a kind of photon rocket (the ones that Spock refers to in "The Cage" instead of their later name of "impulse engines") that burned antimatter in a much simpler way than the warp drive's conversion chambers did and so was less likely to malfunction and need ejection. The photon torpedo warheads could be filled from the impulse supply but that still would leave the problem of no warp field so the photon torpedoes would be limited to sublight (they do not have full warp engines, just warp sustainers so they need the ships field to go to FTL according to more modern Trek dialog).

    TOS dialog also implied that the ship had rear weaponry, including photon torpedo tubes though for budget reasons they never used them on the show. Kirk always specified forward phasers and forward torpedo tubes for instance. I read somewhere that the writers assumed that Enterprise had the same torpedo arrangement as American WWII subs with six forward and four rearward tubes. The special effects people did as well which is why the torpedoes are always shown firing in threes, half the forward tubes in each volley. The only two or four tubes in front and none in back thing was later, just like the pussyfooting around the question of whether phasers are FTL or not even though they clearly used them in warp in TOS (they finally laid that one to rest in the Enterprise series where it turns out that the can indeed use them in warp after they figured out how to tune them to work with the shields and warp fields at the same time).

    On the survey I voted for the TOS Enterprise, it was the most function over form of the bunch which seems the most appropriate. Next would be a tie between the Enterprise-D and the interior of the NX, the exterior of the NX is a disappointing rehash of the TNG and DS9 design philosophy instead of something that makes sense for the series timeframe. Most of the other Enterprises are only so-so, and the Abrams Trek flying brewery is a ridiculous mess that does not even mesh with Star Trek tech at all.

    I really like the ship design presented here, I know it is supposed to be an alternate Reboot style but unlike the 2009 movie one it captures the spirit of the TOS ship and gives it extra character.

    Like many of the other posters I am leery of the weird depressions in the upper hull since the do not seem to serve any particular function and they would complicate the armor stocks considerably for no good reason. The TOS ship was so smooth because it had replaceable armor panels about nine inches thick over a void of about a foot or two and then the pressure hull under that. The greebles that Star Wars ships are covered in are on the surface of the pressure hull and protrude into the void between the hulls. If you look at the drydock sequence at the beginning of TMP you can see one of those panels being put into place using the shield grid standoffs as a mounting point. Supposedly the ships hull is designed to minimize the number of different panel shapes required while still covering the pressure hull as efficiently as possible and those seemingly cosmetic depressions go against that design concept completely.

    The bussards are the best I have seen of the ones that assume the domes are solid material, I would not change them at all except for maybe making the shock needles shinier, but that is a texturing thing anyway. If you want to get crazy detailed you could put heat effects on the needles finish, they would theoretically get incredibly hot from the high speed gas the scoop fields pull in.

    The ships proportions and lines in general are great, much much better than the Abrams Trek train wreck.

    I do not know if you have seen this before or not, but one of the original ships phasers is shown in this frame from "The Cage" dismounted from the ship and mounted on a ground power supply base (the base is not a generator btw, it receives broadcast power from the ship in orbit). To give an idea of scale the gold colored on clear "sighting ring" disk is the same hubcap sized one seen between the control chairs on the bridge so the gun is rather sizable. It might be good for ideas :)

    20080203162930!Laser_cannon.jpg

    In "The Making of Star Trek" Roddenberry mentions that spare phaser cannons are stored in the secondary hull near the fabricators and can be dispatched to damaged turrets via the turbolift shafts and tracks. The same kind of track could be what allows the phasers to run around the rim of the lower sensor dome and fire from there as seen in TOS rather than their designated locations (actually the reason they always came from the base of the lit sensor dome was that the SFX people could not find the turrets on their small traveling mat alignment screens and so placed them around the very visible dome instead).
    100790.jpg
  • SaquistSaquist1 Posts: 0Member
    Just a note:

    While it was a rather common practice to refer to Trek ships as having double hulls or pressure hulls this terminology doesn't fit what Trek has shown in construction.

    Pressure Hulls are often made with as few individual pieces as possible such as wrapped sheet metal for oil and water tanks. In the case of these tanks such hulls are extremely fragile. A tank with without a wind-girder can easily fold and collapse in on itself because of vacuum pressure of wind gust.

    Few submarines are double hulled. The Russian Alpha is one but it was an extremely expensive vessel. These cylinder shaped ships used intensive welding procedure to ensure a high pressure seal. (Welding allows for strong bond than the metal itself) Yet the more seams the greater likely hood of breech under stress and Trek ships have show such a great variance of style the form that it's difficult to believe these ships are truly double hulled.

    Construction has often shown them laying the outer hull even before they had placed components such as subsystems, conduit, cooridors and habitat. One trully would wonder why would Earth follow such a complicated procedure for ship construction. In reality much of designs like the Constitution would be modular (which is the best part of the pod design) This makes construction and repair elegant issue of mere mating and matching tolerances instead of tolerance on the fly such as Air Craft Carriers endured back before CAD.

    (For instance the Hull of Constitution Stardrive could be constructed elsewhere while the interior structure could be assembled in another place. When ready one could merely remove the defector housing and slide the the internal module components into the outer hull. (Cargo First, the Power Engineering spaces next) Of course the likely hood of removing damaged modules from weapons fire and concussive blast is unlikely due to the TIGHT nature the hull has with the habitat but a major overhaul could do just that. However the saucer would be it own module as would the nacelles. But they would have to be built a section at a time...Not Frame First.)
  • Judge Death.Judge Death.1 Posts: 0Member
    I was going by the starfleet tech manual by franz joseph, which pretty much assumed that the ship had 6 phasers and 4 tubes. I know it wasn'r officially canon but it was one of the first and best efforts at expanding trek past the series.

    As to forward phasers, maybe kirk was referring to the two on the underside centerline as opposed to the fight or left phaser banks. it's true the lack of rear firepower seems questionable, but again in space whre a ship can rotate or turn to bring an enemy to bear it was less relevant.
  • Judge Death.Judge Death.1 Posts: 0Member
    Hunter G wrote: »
    Thank you for the opinions. It sound like I'll be starting over again! I'm going to take this opportunity to take a break from Blender for a while, and take those extra classes I've been putting off. So I guess you won't see any updates for a while. And that's that. :cool:

    I undertand wanting to get away from it for a while but I hope McC and I haven't driven you away. Seriously, if I showed you the pix of my ship from it's early days on you'd see how many times Ive started over.
  • Hunter GHunter G1905 Posts: 543Member
    I undertand wanting to get away from it for a while but I hope McC and I haven't driven you away. Seriously, if I showed you the pix of my ship from it's early days on you'd see how many times Ive started over.

    Nah, you guys are good. I wanted to take a break anyway. Now, when I come back to it, I'll be able to start over fresh!
  • BCBC0 Posts: 0Member
    The double hull thing makes sense on the older ships like the Connie where the armor would need replacing often after battles and there are no SI forcefields to seal off holes. It would be a pain to design and maintain but probably much less of one than trying to cut away thick plates of phaser resistant material and somehow fasten in new sections all the time. The void arrangement may even play a part in minimizing hull breaches due to disintegration creep from phaser hits or something like that. Even the Constitution class obviously does not have it in some areas, like where the window strips are on the neck since the hull thickness as seen in the windows is not much if any thicker than the armor itself would be. I get the impression that it is used more like a combination of standoff armor and applique armor on an AFV though it could be something like the voided armor on the WWII battleships just as easily.

    The double hull could make even the saucer modular, parts could be made anywhere like flat orange slices and shipped in and fastened together and then the armor plates laid out over the whole on the standoffs. Before the plating is put on it would probably look like rounded pie wedge tanks with ribs joining them together and a round fan grill like thing enclosing it all.

    The TNG and later ships seem to have dispensed with it (and armor) altogether, their soap bubble hulls seem to be no more than an inch or two thick in some scenes before the SI fields snap up and seal the breach. Ironically the NX Enterprise which one would think would benefit the most from the double hull with easily changed armor panels seems to have the same single hull arrangement as the TNG era ships it resembles, and not even particularly thick hull at that judging by the thickness of the hull patches the alien repair station was holding in its claws in one episode.

    The ships were supposed to be modular and standardized, the Vulcan made Constitution class ship lost in one episode was not discernibly different from the Terran made Enterprise for instance and they would have been able to swap parts easily enough.

    I have a set of the old Franz Joseph plans, they are definitely a good try at working out what the ship would be like in detail though there were some discrepancies between the plans and the way it worked in the show. Some things in the show simply did not make sense from a design standpoint and others like the phasers and torpedoes all came from the base ring of the lower sensor dome in the series since the optical effects people could not find the turrets and tubes on their small traveling mat alignment screens and used the lit dome instead.
  • Judge Death.Judge Death.1 Posts: 0Member
    You need to realize the show was written by a bunch of writers and there was no consistency control, like, say, battlestar galactica's reboot had. God, even in DS9 there was an ep where they made a big deal about going to warp in a solar system being dangerous to the whole system, like that hadn't been happening since TOS!

    Trek has long been plagued by inconsistency and such, later SF shows, but not trek ones it seems, learned to have some sort of consistency and more care to continuity.

    BTW, the constitution class was a federation ship, not vulcan or terran made.
  • McCMcC373 Posts: 704Member
    You need to realize the show was written by a bunch of writers and there was no consistency control, like, say, battlestar galactica's reboot had. God, even in DS9 there was an ep where they made a big deal about going to warp in a solar system being dangerous to the whole system, like that hadn't been happening since TOS!

    Two points worth making here:

    1. There are, essentially, two ways to approach a fictional universe. One is to say "this is a fictional universe, and so we must weigh everything with our best understanding of the author's intent." The other is to say, "Regardless of what the author intended, this is what is depicted in the universe, and barring issues like political spin as a result of editing, what we see is what really happened." The former makes it impossible to have any sort of meaningful discussion about the nature of a fictional universe, because at any given time someone can say, "Oh, yes, but that's not what they meant to happen."

    Short version: "the show was written by a bunch of writers and there was no consistency control" doesn't really work as an argument when you're trying to figure out how things "really" work in a given fictional universe. It's fine when discussing the nature of a show's production, or offering critique about the product. It doesn't work (or at least, doesn't provide a means of useful discussion and analysis) when trying to develop a consistent framework.

    2. The point about "risking" going to warp in a solar system was made as early as TMP (and possibly earlier), so it's not something new that DS9 cooked up. Interestingly, the thinking behind warp drive seemed to change between TOS and TMP. In TOS, it often seemed as though the ship was always traveling at warp speed, using the warp engines, and so on. With the advent of the TMP paradigm, that all changed and "going to warp" carried with it a notable change in the way the ship and space around it were depicted.
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