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evil_genius_180 wrote: »

Not everybody chooses to point out mesh errors in their work.

Yeah, but I'd rather make it known that I've seen the problem and intend to address it than have a chorus of "You've got mesh errors!"

Nice work on the pod tops. For the Sovereign, they weren't hatches. They were just the tops of the pods, to make ILM's job easier.

All true; Eaves (I think it was Eaves, anyway) designed them to be hatches that popped open to reveal the actual pod, the same as it was (supposed to be) on the Galaxy and Intrepid, but pragmatism won out over design intention. In my case, they're really just facades.



Sensor submodule! I included the inset that I plagiar--*cough* used for inspiration from Sternbach's (not Eaves; thanks evil_genius_180 for pointing out my goof!) Voyager detail sketches. This is one of three submodules -- the first, which I've been using up until now, is the armor module (shown center); the second is the sensor module; the third and final is the transporter module...coming soon!

I dunno what's happening in some of the darker areas where it goes all...fuzzy. I understand the sampling noise, but not the blurry fuzz. I suspect I've got a goofy material setting somewhere.

Great stuff, @psCargile!

If you want to isolate glare filters to just the luminous surfaces, make sure you're rendering out the Indirect Transmission and Emission passes separately, and then in the Compositor, add them together (possibly using a "Greater "Than node on the Indirect Transmission pass so that it's limited to just the really bright stuff), and then use them as the input into your Glare node. Set the Glare node to a mix of 1, so it's fully the processed glare output and none of the original input, and then use an Add Node to mix that back into your regular image output. That should give you a very nice, and controllable, illumination-only glare.

You can also take that a step further and do a second, lower-power glare on everything brighter than a certain threshold (again using Greater Than) to get a nice bloom effect on your brightly-light, non-emissive surfaces.

Hope that helps!

Thanks, evil_genius_180 and Aresius!

So, tonight's update has no discernible change (other than the addition of the dorsal phaser strip) from the previous, despite representing two evenings' worth of intensive work! First, the pretty renders:



And now the technical explanation of WTF. It turns out that Cycles, in order to be faster, has a somewhat imprecise ray-to-triangle intersection algorithm. This manifested on Coro here in the form of the light from the interiors leaking through polygon seams! It wasn't too bad at high light levels, but in dark renders it looked terrible. On a hunch, I decided to see what would happen if I fully enclosed the room objects, giving them an interior wall (instead of making them more like open TV sets) with inward-facing normals to ray-intersect with the emitted light. Much to my relief, this actually worked like a charm! Of course, it was also a huge pain in the butt to vertex-snap all of the interior walls to the inside edge of the window inset, hence why it's taken me two evenings to do!

Here's a before/after image with the exposure cranked way up.


Let this be a lesson to any Blender folks out there who plan to put rooms behind their windows!

Judge Death. wrote: »

Speaking of escape pods, ever consider making the whole bridge module an escape module?

Starfleet bridges are designed to be modular to begin with, presumably to be replaced at a starbase with an upgraded version or some such. I wouldn't be surprised if this also included some kind of emergency break-away mechanism that made it a large escape pod.

Aresius wrote: »

I always thought the modules were the entire segment.

They are! There are two levels of modularity at play here.

The idea is that you'd have a number of prefab module wedges that sit around ready to be picked up by a starship as-needed. They're fully self-contained, so basically they could just sit floating in space near a starbase and a ship could swing by, dock with one, and head out on its mission.

Some modules are going to be dramatically different than others, necessitating a completely different interior structure than other modules. But not all of them! Some modules may not need any large structural changes, but only smaller mission-specific components swapped out. Perhaps you want four module types to all contain living quarters. That's where the sub-modules come in. They're designed to be pulled out and plugged in by a starbase (or other drydock facility) to create the prefabs the ships ultimately use.

From a modeling POV, it also lets me change the superficial components of each module without too much hassle.

evil_genius_180 wrote: »

She's looking great so far, dude. :thumb:

Thanks!

Spent most of the day on this, other than a break to watch the US vs. Russia hockey game.




There are some mesh errors around the top of the deck 8 windows (the outer-most ones) that I still need to deal with.

Thanks, evil_genius_180 and Aresius!

Started adding detail to the modular wedges, in the form of Deck 3's windows!



The windows and rooms are a bit more complex than on my Ambassador. There, the windows were just cut-outs in the hull, with full-emissive UV-mapped texture boxes behind them. This time around, the windows have two polygon layers of actual "glass" that includes a slightly glossy surface. The rooms are still UV mapped boxes, but the shader is more complex: the "top" of the box is full emissive, but the rest of the room is a mixture of diffuse with emissive hotspots. In other words, the rooms are not just providing light, they're also being lit this time. Should make for somewhat more realistic looking interiors...not that you'll usually see anything this close-up anyway.

I also did away with my old lighting rig and have gone to a single "sun" lamp model now, with all of the fill light provided by indirect bounce and tone mapping.

Thanks, Aresius!

There isn't really any visual progress here, but the modules and modular connectors are all UVed, frozen, and optimized now.

If you're just joining this thread, hi! Please read the first post for some background info. Many questions have come up over and over again that are answered there. Thanks!

Thanks, evil_genius_180 and Vortext5972!

Decided to reduce the window count on the stardrive a bit after looking at it from various angles. The below renders aren't exciting; just self-illumination-only to show the revised/reduced window layout.


Also added a little shuttle observation/control room at the end of the spine.


Finally, been hard at work on the ventral "notch"/fantail and the underside of the pylons. This includes a very quick color-only overlay texture UV projected from a plane placed beneath the fantail geometry. I got fed up with how bland it was looking without the intended variations in hull panel coloring, so I took a screenshot of the bottom side of the model and then just painted over it. Throwaway work, but it made me feel better.



I think I need to rebuild the trailing edge of the fantail; seeing segmentation there, too. That, at least, shouldn't be nearly as nasty to rebuild as the hull panels were.

This isn't really a 3D update, but I've been plinking away at doing a paintover to plan out where details/surfacing/etc. are going to go. I've been heavily referencing the Sovereign class, with a dash of Intrepid thrown in here and there. I don't intend to fully paint over the whole image; rather, just enough to get a plan in place before I start throwing geometry around. That's why only one module is painted over, one half of the ship, etc.



The windows are actually geometry that's been face-snapped onto the saucer and extruded slightly. The windows are all 0.75m across (some crude measurements of Sovereign windows indicated a width somewhere between 1.9 and 3.8 feet, leaning more toward the former). Since the decks are 2.45m from floor to ceiling (Coro is deliberately meant to feel more cramped than most Starfleet ships), I made the windows 1.35m tall, raising 1m off the floor and giving a 10cm clearance between the top arch of the window and the ceiling.

The inner-most windows shown (Deck E) are actually portholes when viewed edge-on; 0.75m circles. It's only the extreme slope of the deck that makes them look so elongated. If you were standing inside the ship facing out one of those windows from where the "top" starts, you'd have 5 meters between you and the bottom of the window, which is awfully huge for a porthole. The Deck F windows (next row out) are the same vertical height as the Deck G (outermost) windows, yet they stick into a room almost as far as the Deck E portholes do. The Deck G windows, for contrast, only stick in about 1.8m -- much more reasonable. So, I may ditch the E and F windows entirely.

The non-module windows have a different arrangement pattern than the modules do. The modules all share the same pattern.

I threw some annotations on the modular components to indicate intended functionality and relationships. The main phaser array interlocks emitters between the modular segments and the module spars, creating a single continuous strip regardless of the ship's mission configuration.

C&C (and suggestions!) welcome.

And there I go with another 3+ month drought. Sorry about that... I wish I could say I've not been idle on this, but the truth is I kinda have. However, I started working again last night and finally finished a feature that has been giving me a particularly hard time! More on that in a moment.

Aresius wrote: »

Please don't mistake my comments as something bad. While many might think that pointing to a likeness in appearance is bad (plagiarism as out-of-verse insult, too similar design to be a different class as in-verse point), I mean it in the terms of It looks similar to an epic design, and thus itself is also epic.

Ahh, okay. I'm sorry to have taken in the wrong way, then. I'm a bit sensitive where this ship's design is concerned, due to the very long history I have with it.

TeddyDaddy wrote: »

Can I have a question which in probably many people are interested: how did you manage to make this materials ? Keep going!

The deflector material is actually really simple, to the point where it's almost cheating. Here's a screenshot of the node setup (click to enlarge):



Basically, it's two overlapping Checker Textures, using the hull's bounding box coordinates as their input and then manipulated with Mapping nodes so that they stack to make the lines. The dark part is a simple bronze diffuse + white beckmann glossy addition and the blue part is alternating colors of blue feeding into an emission shader.

So! Coro always had the ability to land, since she's not a huge ship and drew a lot of inspiration from the capabilities exhibited by Voyager. There's a particularly epic moment from the old sim where she lands on planet in a distant galaxy (we fell through a wormhole at one point, y'see, and got stuck) that I've long intended to animate. After a lot of fighting with mesh errors and rebuilding geometry and so on, I finally managed to create the landing struts and the bay doors. Then I had to figure out how to animate the damn things, which involved learning about Blender's Drivers feature (very similar to Maya's). This entire animation is controlled by just three custom attributes on the "Hull" mesh (Doors Open, Gear Extended, Gear Angled), which are used to drive other objects' properties. The doors themselves are animated via Shape Keys rather than transforms and they are absolutely and totally a cheat that I plan to further disguise with texturing. Anyway, here's a quick OpenGL viewport render of them animating:

Yes, the landing feet do clear the bay doors. Just barely. Obviously, these feet alone wouldn't support the ship's weight or even weight distribution; I'm planning to integrate rear legs into the warp pylons. The saucer, like Voyager's will have to be held aloft by SIF and low-level tractor beam repulsion or some such.

Onward!

Thanks, Aresius!

Knight26 wrote: »

So is that fighter suppossed to be the wing commander 4 bearcat?

Indeed it is! The Spectres were basically Trekked up Bearcats. For a long time, the only reference we had for what Spectres were supposed to look like was a painting of a Bearcat. I took a crack at modeling a low-res one, meant to accompany Coronado in her renders, when I did the second version of the ship in 2003. I'll probably do the same thing again for this one, going a little more Trek and a little less "hey, this is straight out of Wing Commander..." this time, too.

For now, I just took one of the old renderings and slapped it on a box for scale reference.

Finished merging the saucer and stardrive into one continuous mesh this evening.




Still have some cleanup work to do before the subsurf is smooth enough, but it was far less of a bear than I expected it to be. I love how hunchbacked the ship ended up looking with the catapult platform drawn way far out into the stardrive. Before, the slope from what used to be the impulse deck was very gradual and kind of boring. Now? Coro is out to give someone a beatdown.