Edited the dais. I really like Blender's Screw Modifier which made building the walls and consoles fast and easy. Like a honky tonk tramp, modeling should be fast and easy.
Crewman Jones misses his Miley concert video.
The paint is just about dry, isn't it crewman Jones.
I plan to build a chair and plop a seated figure in it and plan out the consoles. These were just rough guesses for planning, scaling and positioning. I know Probert likes his bridges to be spacious lobbies with koi ponds and relaxing fountains, but I think the bridge need only be big enough to allow crew to get to their stations unimpeded, and quickly to the latrine for those times when the food synthesizer glitches.
I like the smaller layout. There's none of that wasted space you got with the later ships. That's one thing that irks me about the Enterprise-D and Voyager. Their bridges weren't much bigger than the original E's bridge, but they had a lot less consoles. So, they wound up with all of those big, open areas. (though, Voyager's sets were too big in general for a ship its size, because they were redressed TNG sets, but that's a whole other discussion)
I see the appeal for the more condensed, bare-bone interiors on the earlier and smaller ships, but I can understand the lushness of the End-D bridge. By then, Starfleet has tamed a fairly large portion of space and it is a much bigger ship. More a hotel in space than a submarine. That said, I still wish the bridge in Generations is the bridge that they had throughout the entire series. I loved that set.
The side stations for the Enterprise-D bridge were planned early on. Unfortunately, they only appeared in "Yesterday's Enterprise" and "Generations." This was due to the higher cost of keeping them staffed with extras on a weekly basis.
I don't have a problem with the Enterprise-D having a spacious layout as much as I do with Voyager having one. Voyager was intended to be more advanced than the Ent-D but only 2/3 the size. It stands to reason that, if the ship is smaller, the interior is smaller too. But, that didn't happen because they redressed Ent-D sets to build the interiors.
Yeah, Voyagers bridge was too big. The only set I really like from that ship is Sickbay. Astrometrics was pretty good as well. Never liked their engineering.
I never liked the cavernous corridors. Talk about wasted space. Though, I guess it does allow nice jogging room, as was seen in at least one episode.
Off topic, but I've been rewatching Voyager season 1 on DVD. I love it, in the pilot, when the Caretaker's anomaly is going to hit the ship. Janeway says "Brace for impact!" and her moronic first officer runs across the bridge. (and is subsequently killed, allowing Chakotay to take his place) How does a Lt. Cdr. with gray hair not understand that "brace for impact" means grab onto something, not run across the room?
The good thing about what we do is that we don't have to design movie/television bridge sets.
Chief Recreational Officer reporting for duty.
Why is it that when software developers upgrade, they include new and better features and omit others? MakeHuman used to add to the Blender export rigging for the face, but not the new version, except for the jaw. They did add the facial symmetry feature I (and probably many more) asked for, as it is easier to add asymmetry after editing the face, than to do each feature of each side of the face, but I hate that I would rather use the first version for the better rigging. And I had to rename two vertices groups to get the shoes rigged to the feet, because having them rigged to the upper shins wasn't doing anything good.
Didn't want to spend all day doing a character, but I did. Had to use two shrink wrap modifiers plus subsurface to keep parts of her breast from showing through--I didn't feel like pushing vertices like I did on the woman in the Yacht post.
The insignia is meant to be a perspective viewed column representing the Titan Hyperion holding up one corner of the sky, with a polygon behind it representing the Ritchey; I had to distort the hell out of it to make it look proper on the mesh. The U.S.S Hyperion insignia would have the column and a sunburst behind it. Each ship of the class would have the column, and another symbol representative of the individual vessel.
I named the ship after my great-great grandfather who married my great-great grandmother a few months after my great grandfather was born. If they had made other choices, I would be a Ritchey instead of a Cargile.
That's true. It's a huge job to design a set. Not only do you have to try to make it fit with the exterior design, but you also have to worry about things like where the camera and other equipment goes. Though, it's way less excusable when game makers do it:
Nice job on the character. Does MakeHuman make the clothes and hair too, or did you do those? By the way, if she's supposed to be a Lt. Cdr., her rank is upside down. The dashed stripe is on top of the solid one.
Ah, hallways you could drive a truck through, nice. One thing I have noticed is that certain camera lens sizes are better suited for certain environments. Externally, I use 35mm almost exclusively. But for interiors, in order to capture much of the space, I've started using 16mm for wide angle. I can see that in a game were you might not be able to switch from and to different simulated lens sizes, you would have to build spacious interiors so that players could see much of the room they are in without wide angle. Maybe that is what is going on, but I don't know why they wouldn't be able to have different lens angles.
MakeHuman provides some stock hair and clothes; the t-shirts come with Blender's logo emblazoned across them. I have to alter the textures. I usually prefer to make hair with Blender's hair making tools.
What disappoints me is that have Smith-Micro products that I assumed would open each others files. I have Poser, which I thought would enable me to create characters, but instead it only allows to alter the characters it comes with, or the ones you can purchase from third parties. Poser is basically playing with virtual dolls. I have Manga Studio, which has 3d manikins and manga characters you can pose, but there isn't any way to import a Poser character, and I think there should be. Then I bought Silo, which is their 3d modeling program that appears to be made to build character meshes, but you can't import or export Poser files, so I don't know what the point is. It's UI has to be the worst. I end up spending more time undoing mistakes more than getting any built. Blender is free and if you are patient, you can do everything in it.
Still could use some work on the insignia, but at this stage I'm going to build another character in the older version to get the face controls I want.
Be nice if there was a single button to press for imagine links instead of having the three steps of URL, select over, and IMG.
It's nice to get a closer look at the insignia. I like it. I'll have to check out Makehuman. I tried it once years ago, but I didn't do much with it.
Yeah, Poser always seemed to me to be pretty useless. Like the name says, you can pose stuff. Big whoop. It's shady as hell that their other software can't open the Poser files. I wish I'd stuck with Blender when I first tried it in late 2004/early 2005. I'll bet I'd be a Blenderhead now if I'd converted then. (I'd probably be using a Linux distribution as my main OS too) The problem is, I came into it later, after I'd already become more or less proficient in another program. So, I can't get into it. Fortunately, Lightwave is much more to my liking and I got a sweet deal on Ebay. Though, if I want to upgrade to the latest version, it's still $500. (and that's the reduced price for having registered products on NewTek already :argh:) Maybe I'll eventually give Blender another go.
Yeah, I did the same thing, DL an early version of Blender and found it immediately impossible to use--the old blue one with the GUI across the bottom. Then there was compatibility issues with Window's Vista (surprise surprise) and I had to wait for a version that ran with the 64 Bit OS. No problems with it on Windows 7.
MakeHuman is stupid easy. I just discovered I needed to DL the Blendertools for making hair and clothes for the imported meshes, although I can make hair using Blender's particle strand feature.
Right now, I'm cursing the Makehuman download server. Gawd, it's slow. I have 6 Mb/s internet, I shouldn't be downloading between 30 and 100 KB/s. I know it's not my end because I aborted earlier tested my connection by downloading something from another site, which ran between 870 KB/s and 1 MB/s, which is normal for me.
I tried Blender after I lost my Truespace 2 floppies back in the day. I was going to stick with it until I found out Truespace 3 had been released for free. Now I wish I hadn't found that out. Of course, I had no way of knowing then that Truespace sucked and was going to go kaput a few years later.
Scratch the hair making thing, just clothes. I find it easier to modify their clothes than to make new ones. Reading the tut on MakeHuman, and hating that tutorial writers never can seem to write tutorials for people that have no clue what the hell they are doing.
The holidays haven't kept me from working on this.
The Ritchey insignia patch for Sciences finalized: wings behind a column in perspective.
Bridge consoles reworked with a figure aid. Counter-clockwise from the aft station: Communications, Sciences/Library Terminal, Sciences/Sensors, and Navigation Cartography. Clockwise from aft doorway: Engineering, Environmental, and Defense. And of course, the Helm and Navigation stations are due to be installed next Tuesday.
Manga Studio has a mesh deform that allowed me to use the UV map of the shirt to better align the insignia, which is a copy of the above. Blender's hair feature is both easy and a pain in the ass. I've done better hair, so I need to play around with the specular so it doesn't like she's wearing a mop.
Hair and clothing are two of the hardest things to do in CGI, or so I've been told. I can't say I've ever attempted hair, but clothing is a pill. I've tried that a few times.
The insignia looks good, as does the bridge layout.
MakeHuman makes the clothing for you. All I do is edit the textures, and sometimes the mesh to make them fit the body better. I try to make good use of Blender's Mask, Shrinkfit, and Solidify (to give thickness to the clothing mesh), which never works as well as you want. I don't know, call me crazy but I prefer the shirt breasts to be at the same height as the model's breasts, and in the original import, they were lower, and I don't want the clothes to look like snowsuits. This import also did not have the right vertices group assigned to the shoes for masking, so I had to fix that. But overall, MakeHuman does the all the hard stuff for you. I can't image the time, aggravation, and homicidal tendencies that would arise in trying to rig a figure mesh myself. Rigging bones to mechanical systems is difficult enough.
Yeah, clicking the Strand Render radio button helps prevent mophead. The hair is as close as I care to get it for scale reference models; I could spend the better part of this year trying to get it more realistic. Also pulled the shirt out between the breasts so it wouldn't be too conformal.
Figure is made from the current version of MakeHuman that does not yet have facial controls. Over the Christmas break, I made a model with the older version that does have facial controls, but the over all mesh is inferior with the common, weird shoulder distortions. I'll have to make the male figure for the rest of the bridge layout designs.
You must be talking about the nightly build version, because the current stable release has facial controls. I know this because I was messing around with it yesterday.
What I mean is when you export to mhx file for Blender, version 1.0 alpha 7 exported facial rigging for controlling much of the face to make expressions, but 01.0.2 only has rigging for the jaw, the tongue, and eyelids--unless there is a MH exported rig I haven't tried yet. On the other hand, Poser has very good expression control.
Ah, I see. Those facial controls. Yeah, I haven't messed with rigging yet. I don't even know how well that will convert, since I'm having to convert my MH creations to .fbx so that I can load them in Lightwave. I tried .obj, but that resulted in too many flipped faces.
Posts
I did not spend a lot of time on that chair.
The seat is a little too high. I noticed this when I seated the figure. I have lowered it.
I...I don't know what to say.
[video=youtube_share;zHnxRMhjPkY]
Edited the dais. I really like Blender's Screw Modifier which made building the walls and consoles fast and easy. Like a honky tonk tramp, modeling should be fast and easy.
I plan to build a chair and plop a seated figure in it and plan out the consoles. These were just rough guesses for planning, scaling and positioning. I know Probert likes his bridges to be spacious lobbies with koi ponds and relaxing fountains, but I think the bridge need only be big enough to allow crew to get to their stations unimpeded, and quickly to the latrine for those times when the food synthesizer glitches.
I don't have a problem with the Enterprise-D having a spacious layout as much as I do with Voyager having one. Voyager was intended to be more advanced than the Ent-D but only 2/3 the size. It stands to reason that, if the ship is smaller, the interior is smaller too. But, that didn't happen because they redressed Ent-D sets to build the interiors.
Off topic, but I've been rewatching Voyager season 1 on DVD. I love it, in the pilot, when the Caretaker's anomaly is going to hit the ship. Janeway says "Brace for impact!" and her moronic first officer runs across the bridge. (and is subsequently killed, allowing Chakotay to take his place) How does a Lt. Cdr. with gray hair not understand that "brace for impact" means grab onto something, not run across the room?
I hate when they do stuff like that in shows and movies, when it's clearly just to get a character out of the way for the story.
Chief Recreational Officer reporting for duty.
Why is it that when software developers upgrade, they include new and better features and omit others? MakeHuman used to add to the Blender export rigging for the face, but not the new version, except for the jaw. They did add the facial symmetry feature I (and probably many more) asked for, as it is easier to add asymmetry after editing the face, than to do each feature of each side of the face, but I hate that I would rather use the first version for the better rigging. And I had to rename two vertices groups to get the shoes rigged to the feet, because having them rigged to the upper shins wasn't doing anything good.
Didn't want to spend all day doing a character, but I did. Had to use two shrink wrap modifiers plus subsurface to keep parts of her breast from showing through--I didn't feel like pushing vertices like I did on the woman in the Yacht post.
The insignia is meant to be a perspective viewed column representing the Titan Hyperion holding up one corner of the sky, with a polygon behind it representing the Ritchey; I had to distort the hell out of it to make it look proper on the mesh. The U.S.S Hyperion insignia would have the column and a sunburst behind it. Each ship of the class would have the column, and another symbol representative of the individual vessel.
I named the ship after my great-great grandfather who married my great-great grandmother a few months after my great grandfather was born. If they had made other choices, I would be a Ritchey instead of a Cargile.
Nice job on the character. Does MakeHuman make the clothes and hair too, or did you do those? By the way, if she's supposed to be a Lt. Cdr., her rank is upside down. The dashed stripe is on top of the solid one.
They think they know better than you, the user, what makes a program good. It irks me when they do that stuff.
MakeHuman provides some stock hair and clothes; the t-shirts come with Blender's logo emblazoned across them. I have to alter the textures. I usually prefer to make hair with Blender's hair making tools.
What disappoints me is that have Smith-Micro products that I assumed would open each others files. I have Poser, which I thought would enable me to create characters, but instead it only allows to alter the characters it comes with, or the ones you can purchase from third parties. Poser is basically playing with virtual dolls. I have Manga Studio, which has 3d manikins and manga characters you can pose, but there isn't any way to import a Poser character, and I think there should be. Then I bought Silo, which is their 3d modeling program that appears to be made to build character meshes, but you can't import or export Poser files, so I don't know what the point is. It's UI has to be the worst. I end up spending more time undoing mistakes more than getting any built. Blender is free and if you are patient, you can do everything in it.
Still could use some work on the insignia, but at this stage I'm going to build another character in the older version to get the face controls I want.
Be nice if there was a single button to press for imagine links instead of having the three steps of URL, select over, and IMG.
Yeah, Poser always seemed to me to be pretty useless. Like the name says, you can pose stuff. Big whoop. It's shady as hell that their other software can't open the Poser files. I wish I'd stuck with Blender when I first tried it in late 2004/early 2005. I'll bet I'd be a Blenderhead now if I'd converted then. (I'd probably be using a Linux distribution as my main OS too) The problem is, I came into it later, after I'd already become more or less proficient in another program. So, I can't get into it. Fortunately, Lightwave is much more to my liking and I got a sweet deal on Ebay. Though, if I want to upgrade to the latest version, it's still $500. (and that's the reduced price for having registered products on NewTek already :argh:) Maybe I'll eventually give Blender another go.
MakeHuman is stupid easy. I just discovered I needed to DL the Blendertools for making hair and clothes for the imported meshes, although I can make hair using Blender's particle strand feature.
I tried Blender after I lost my Truespace 2 floppies back in the day. I was going to stick with it until I found out Truespace 3 had been released for free. Now I wish I hadn't found that out. Of course, I had no way of knowing then that Truespace sucked and was going to go kaput a few years later.
https://www.facebook.com/StarTrekEnterpriseSeason5NetflixCampaign/photos/a.574372305915776.1073741826.574284575924549/903520303000973/?type=1&theater
The Ritchey insignia patch for Sciences finalized: wings behind a column in perspective.
Bridge consoles reworked with a figure aid. Counter-clockwise from the aft station: Communications, Sciences/Library Terminal, Sciences/Sensors, and Navigation Cartography. Clockwise from aft doorway: Engineering, Environmental, and Defense. And of course, the Helm and Navigation stations are due to be installed next Tuesday.
Manga Studio has a mesh deform that allowed me to use the UV map of the shirt to better align the insignia, which is a copy of the above. Blender's hair feature is both easy and a pain in the ass. I've done better hair, so I need to play around with the specular so it doesn't like she's wearing a mop.
The insignia looks good, as does the bridge layout.
Yeah, clicking the Strand Render radio button helps prevent mophead. The hair is as close as I care to get it for scale reference models; I could spend the better part of this year trying to get it more realistic. Also pulled the shirt out between the breasts so it wouldn't be too conformal.
Figure is made from the current version of MakeHuman that does not yet have facial controls. Over the Christmas break, I made a model with the older version that does have facial controls, but the over all mesh is inferior with the common, weird shoulder distortions. I'll have to make the male figure for the rest of the bridge layout designs.
You must be talking about the nightly build version, because the current stable release has facial controls. I know this because I was messing around with it yesterday.
Took a station out to see how well it looked with more symmetry.
And back with all seven.