Greetings.
By my calculation, 4 years since I touched 3DS Max. I had a bit of a dabble with Blender in the intervening years, but there are some fundamentals I just can't get my head around, so back to Max we go.
2 years after that, back in 2016, I submitted a post here
http://www.scifi-meshes.com/forums/showthread.php?82153-Official-ST-Fan-FIlm-Guidelines&p=606741&highlight=#post606741 in which I reacted to the CBS clamp down on Star Trek Fan Films, but suggesting putting forward a new setting, for people to make fan films in.
I did not forget about that, instead I wrote a small bible. Then I made a website. Then I hid the website and started on You-tube because the website was too dry.
And now I'm gonna bring it here.
This is the UNITI Project, and you are invited to come play.
Posts
But getting people to provide assets for free (doing my best to resist monetising until I have no other option!) is very difficult, and from what I can tell, creative people want to see existing stuff before they want to add their own flare to it, so here I am, making bad art and models, just to spearhead the charge.
Check out the You-tube playlist in my signature. The videos so far are short and general, but offer some background into the universe. The first 70% of Episode 2 is probably the most informative at a high level, though my attempt at 'dry narration' was epic-scale-boring (For Episode 3 I decided to use a drunk-sounding professor voice!) - Try it here: https://youtu.be/gFDjexhxz8E
If you remember my old stuff (6+ years ago!) then fear not, all my previous work (except direct Star Trek models) has been brought into this setting, across 500 years of history. And there is much more to come!
I have a friend on Twitter, whom I gave some 'race' information to and he gave me 3 sketches for design donations. Here's them, comprising of an Alien (though nothing like the silhouette I sent him!!) a strike craft and a mothership.
So I started with doing my own sketch, then set about building it.. and remembering that I used to like building boxes.. and curves kill me... unngh..
Also, if you want to get more people involved, I'm not sure the retro look is what you really want, not that your designs aren't interesting.
If you have any suggestions, I can sure come up with something at some point.
Unity as in the game engine or is there another thing? To be honest, even UNITI has been used, there is nothing new left which hasn't been done somewhere. I thought Unified Nuclei Incorporating Technology and Intelligence would have been fairly unique but meh...
As for the designs, this is a design supplied by a contributor, which I'm turning into below-average 3D, hoping someone might come and replace one day, but these are just a single design ethic. I did a post in the SFM Discord with low poly versions of capital ships from 21 of the 'member' races but the official modern UNITI fleet design is going to be modelled around my old Alternate Star Trek design the Parallax, once half built by the mighty Medjai, and then Deks considered completing the mission but we all let real life happen. The 'Global Republic' stuff I did about 12 years ago is incorporated but is like '300 years before UNITI, this is what humans were flying around in'... I also have some rough idea scribbles for some of the neighbouring races too (alien silhouette and space ships) so I've got plenty more to bring to the table.
Your model is coming along well, too.
I wasn't so worried that Unity (or UNITI) had been used, but since Unity is so popular right now, I would be afraid that your brand would be "polluted" or at least confusing for someone searching for it.
Not exactly the same thing, but when David Tennant encountered the Cult of Skaro and the hybrid human/Dalek, it completely destroyed everyone's searches looking for images or merchandise for "real" Daleks. Suddenly, when you searched Dalek figures, you were getting almost exclusively results for that hybrid.
I do love this idea and will try to contribute in the near future.
I'll look it up in a sec, but I think it's a game format.
I'm not a gamer, I just hear a lot about it in the 3d arena.
Haven't done any 3D modelling in the last couple of weeks due to holiday, work and setting myself up to start on a shapeways store.
To keep you from dying of boredom, here is an attempt by me to learn to draw people, using a 10p biro. It's not brilliant but that's more the sketcher than the biro.
This is a ship captain from around 55 years before the 'current' setting, Melanie Uhmposa. I'm sure with some filters and stuff I could make it look almost vaguely human.
I wasn't entirely inactive during that time, though I keep opening Max, looking at the screen, sighing and then shutting it off! I need to get some energy going again! I have some time off work now, but going away without the big lump of a computer my old 3DS is on.
In the meantime, here is some old cargo ship, I am cobbling together... I do not know why the background keeps going white...
Figured out I had "alpha channel" ticked and that was why the background kept going clear, at least in thumbnails. Nice to be back in the black!
Anyway, here's some shots of the Eden. If anyone wants to model another 'realistic' design, 2 more came 80 years after this one. (And pre-date all other human ships in the IP)
Red is weapons (Turrets and launchers)
Green is Tractor emitters and shuttle Bays
Pink is fuel storage tanks
Yellow is cargo bays
Red-Wire is lift shafts
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Anyway, I've done more stuff since, like upgrading the landing gear.
I restarted the lower hull and decided to make it one deck deeper, just because I wanted to fit more internal stuff in. Landing feet are placed around the base of the hull and underneath the side engines.
Pretty sure most hardcore nitpickers will recognise she's unlikely to keep her balance or something but I'm happy enough that the rest of the landing capacity is hand-wavey Star-trek-level of Technology...ish
Now to fill in all those cut outs and give the gears enough space to retract in to the hull for when she's flying. Then I did some work on the internals. These aren't really supposed to be 'nicely detailed' like the messy-desk crew manage or anything like that but they should be enough for me to understand where things are and make sure I have enough internal space.
Here, for example, Deck 11 primarily has waste reclamation. They are big on recycling in the UNITI future, and essentially they take all the 'human waste material' and compost it down into stuff that can basically be turned into food, with the addition of some key elements. The UNITI doesn't have replicators as per Star Trek, where energy and matter are interchangeable, but they basically have it for matter, to the atomic level, so they essentially break down yer poop into component elements, then resequence them, add about 2% of 'new stuff' and then feed it back to you.
This is all various forms of waste reclamation, recycling and some fluid tanks. The little tiny nubbin bits are Atmospheric scrubbers, which suck in air and clean it, then blow it out the other side. Again, there is some molecular cleansing and then storage and re-use here, where possible.
Then on Deck 10 we have a little bit of corridor space and walling going on, with the lowest deck for the two main elevator shafts. These two shafts are the only ones that go almost all the way through the ship, most others tend to be 3-5 levels each (Which will mean in the event of catastrophic failure, no 700 metre lift plumments of death, which is good. Also slows down any invaders.
some of the fluid tanks from Deck 11 had to go up through to this deck. There's a lot of fluid needs storing for long space journeys! A few atmo scrubbers on this deck too, and in reality all those doorways would have bulkheads. The internals of UNITI ships are a little more like submarines, in that they have a lot of physical walls, instead of forcefields, for when hull breaches occur.
The two shuttles are roughly the size of Galaxy Class Type 6 shuttles, perhaps a tiny bit bigger. They fill up the main shuttle bay and this serves to remind us we have a small ship here, just 209 metres long if memory serves. There will be more shuttle/drone bays in the upper superstructure. Think of these as visitor shuttle bays.
There's some funny looking stuff at the front there, those are the maintenance crawl-ways, or Maintways as we call them. These are just the bottom half of them as the top half crosses into the floor space of Deck 9. On the plus side, out of shot, there are also ladders to get up there.
Funny thing is, the middle one of these took about an hour to build whereas I think the model it replaced took about 5, despite the fact that the replacement looks bulkier.
I'd have put these on the discord but everytime I post anything on Discord Howie keeps flooding it with awesome Star Wars pictures.
BTW: Now that Coolhand has "liked" your pictures you know that by SFM law you have to add a vending machine to your ship?
I had no idea there was a vending machine rule. Do I need to model the snacks?!
The snacks are more of an Insane Detail Club thing, different piece of SFM history.