Rekkert

@BolianAdmiral: Thanks mate, that's high praise for the Thunderchild bridge coming from you!

@richiewilch: That would be the USS Columbia bridge, I'm still working on it from time to time, though it's one of the many rooms that were affected by the initial wave of Covid and were put on the back burner. It's 80% done at this stage, I should just focus on it for a while and get it done, but as I'll mention below it's not that simple right now.

@Warp Propulsion Laboratory: The fact that there's no crew is simply due to the fact we lack any sort of crew models' I'd love to get into that branch of modeling but it's a whole different world. The idea to add the borg cube was mine as Scragnog wanted to do the ship in red alert, so it's in a sense how the ship would've looked like during the battle of Sector 001. You just have to use your imagination for the crew.

Oh wow it's been a while since I posted. Summer came around these parts and as pretty much always that means power outages. And when it doesn't mean power outages, it means internet outages because other parts of the city don't have power. So, yeah, December and now January are proving extremely slow because of this.

Someone who's been firing on all cylinders though is @scragnog, who's produced a few other flybys of interiors. First is a VHS filtered showcase of the USS Ross bridge, with some LCARS replaced by animated versions provided by Adge's lcars.org.uk: You can watch it here.

He also did an alternate, "clean" version for people who couldn't watch the VHS filtered one due to epilepsy or other conditions: You can watch it here.

And finally my favorite of his yet, a showcase of the USS Potemkin shuttlebay: You can watch it here.

As for myself, the only thing in general I was able to produce, simply due to how quick it was to do, was a redress of the Thunderchild bridge for @Rory1707, which uses the colors of the Emmett Till bridge and thus ends up looking a lot darker and more battleship-like; despite this, in-universe the Athena is meant mainly as an exploratory vessel. Here are a couple renders of the Athena bridge, a lot more are on my portfolio.

Glad you're all liking how it's coming together!

@richiewilch: Each room has a small corridor leading up to the bridge from each side.

I slowly kept working on this during the past week whenever time allowed. I wasn't too big a fan of the curve the handrail followed, and I didn't want to just reuse the Voyager coffee table here, so I swapped the design for an oval shaped one (with a glass top, I think it looks better), and redid the handrail and steps to follow along that shape. I also tweaked the wall behind the desk a bit; added back the blue lights at the bottom of the dark columns; added LCARS for the replicator and desktop monitor; and did another pass on the shape of the support behind the couch.

The biggest stuff that's missing now is decor. The Corps of Engineers books have the Appalachia under the command of Captain Ahmed al-Rashid, so while I don't necessary consider that written in stone as far as my version of the ship goes, it gave me the idea to incorporate some arabic elements into the decor of the ready room. I also want to make it somewhat more colorful as right now the room is overly grey and a bit boring IMO.

@richiewilch: Maybe it was a blackjack table which the art department used? This style of desk was seen on the Enterprise-E in Nemesis.

Been slowly making more progress on the ready room, and changed the layout a bit. The little side alcove where the desk previously was is now completely gone, and the desk is now placed on the front wall, opposite the windows. The shape of the steps is now also different, following a more organic line along the room. There'll still be handrails next to the drop though, especially behind the chairs, so don't worry about people falling over.

Again, super early days with stuff like the sofa and coffee table, and the desk is still just temporary, though now more similar in size to how the final one will be.

@markmassey: Thanks! You and me both, though I'm liking the aesthetics of SNW!.

@Rory1707: Thanks mate!

@BlueNeumann: Indeed, I'm counting on it

Mmm, I hadn't noticed that @BolianAdmiral, but @Rusty0918 is right, it's down to the colors matching a bit too much between the bulkhead and the deck, I might have to tweak the lighting a bit to compensate.

After looking at some vertical wall decorations online that I felt would fit the style (thanks Pinterest lol), I created a piece out of metal elements to hang on one of the walls, which I then colored in order to make a bit more interesting.

I've also placed a small replicator next to it, though I haven't added the LCARS to it yet. Honestly I'm not sure I like it or the placement, I might eliminate the replicator entirely from this room. Thoughts?

Also, I moved the two doors a bit towards the inner wall of the room (so, in the render below, the door is more to the left than it was before). This was in order to add more space for the decorations on one side, rather than having the doors centered on their walls as was the case on TNG.

Continued to update the renders on my site as time allows and converting the ships to the new format. I took the chance to do a slight redesign I've been thinking about for a while on the Cerberus bridge. Originally the bridge featured 6 consoles in a row at each side, which in retrospect I never quite liked, it ended up looking too much like overkill IMO. So I simply swapped the 3 aft consoles with the exit alcoves, meaning that while the number of stations remains the same, they are more distributed around the bridge, helping it look more balanced. I also changed the registry number from NCC-74915 to NCC-75110, which was the registry given for Cerberus on the Star Trek Adventures Utopia Planitia sourcebook.

I was happy with that change and that was gonna be the end of it, but when I was gonna update the site I realized something, this would be the third ship with the exact (or almost exact) same "Enterprise-E" aesthetic, alongside both the Yeager and Ross. So I tested out some different colors and ended up swapping the style for a mix of Enterprise-E and Voyager greys. I think this works better for the role intended for Cerberus, and it better differentiates it from the other ships I already have.

Old version (which I'm sure you'll all prefer ):



New version:

@evil_genius_180: Thanks! In this case yeah, the LCARS are more work than the modeling, I should've done the screens smaller

@PreViz: Yes, all vectors on Inkscape

@mishasiegfried: Thanks!

Did the LCARS for the two small consoles by the warp core, based on similar Voyager displays.

I don't know why you're assuming the chairs would be empty, all stations are meant to be crewed at all time, just as on the Enterprise-E and almost all ships we see in Trek. The TNG style chairs made sense as Probert intended for those stations to be empty 90% of the time, that's not the case here.

BlueNeumann wrote: »

I feel like that's part of the original intention of the Ent-A bridge with the two levels of monitors. The bottom row is for the user of the station, the top is for the rest of the bridge crew. The captain can get an overview of what's up at any of those stations just by glancing at it (this is my headcanon for why the same displays are used for top and bottom monitors, and why the top ones are bigger).

Yep, you're spot on with that, the Enterprise-A bridge consoles were designed with the same mentality as the TOS ones, small monitors for the seated officer to see, and larger displays up-top to share information with others. It's worth pointing out that Cerberus, just like the Ent-E, use the exact same console design as the Enterprise-A, so this is retained.


While I'm still musing what to do with Cerberus, I went ahead and updated the Emmett Till bridge to the new format as well. A while back I had swapped the carpet colors on that bridge so that the colors would pop a bit more, and I think I never mentioned it over here, so here's a before and after of that; plus some of the new changes I did this time around, like LCARS falloff, and some material tweaks, and a new dedication plaque mixing in the Enterprise-E and Picard styles, given the ship's timeframe of 2395.

This was the last ship I was planning to bring over to the new format. The remaining personal projects I did are so old at this point and were superseded by other projects that I don't feel like ever updating them. It might change in the future of course, but for now I intend for them to stay where they are indefinitely.

Glad you all liked the engineering set!

@lennier1: I intend to do that concept piece as Appalachia's engineering one day. I didn't consciously draw inspiration from it here, but with the raised ceiling I definitely see the similarities now.

Remember the USS Yeager ready room? Work on it was finished, but I was waiting for a 3D render I commissioned from Angelos Karderinis to be complete. In the meantime Blender 4.0 released so I tweaked the lights and materials with the new goodies, and rendered it with the new AgX View Transform rather than the old Filmic.







And here's Angelos' piece in full glory, I'm super happy with how it turned out!

Slowly but surely doing more of the LCARS...

@Rory1707: Yeah, I originally intended to have a red alert indicator there, though it didn't work out as I wanted, and making the ship's schematic turn red doesn't look good IMO. I'll keep experimenting with red alert stuff tomorrow.

@BolianAdmiral: Indeed, that indicator was there all through the series, and on the original 'The Search' version of the bridge all stations had one identical to that one above the keyboards, they were removed for subsequent episodes.

I did one final change to the bridge as I had all the labels indicating this is deck 1, despite the bridge on the Akira being on deck 4, so I've corrected this. The red alert thingy I wanted to do didn't work as I planned, I'll try some more stuff for it tomorrow. In the meantime, here are the finished 'green alert' renders!