3DSciFi

jeesless rc3 is out. lol
 

I know you guys came up with 2.7 and such, but I could not be happier about  2.8+ . Hell even Ubisoft 's movie department has become a gold member ( not the game division, the film industry side)

The problem is, they've gone and changed a lot of things, and some of the functions don't seem to work like they should. A great example is this. Importing a mesh with multiple layers from 2.79b, I get this:



Only the active layer from the imported object is visible. I can see the other layers in the upper right, under "Collections." (that's what they call them now instead of layers) But, I can't find a way to make them visible. According to the settings, they should be. I've tried messing with the settings over there, nothing will make the inactive layers on the imported object visible.

But, if I go into 2.79b and make all of the layers visible, then save the file, they're visible in 2.80 RC3. I can also use the tools in the upper right to make them invisible or visible at will. So, why doesn't it work with the layers that were inactive in the saved object?



Other than that, it's a big problem of trying to figure out where the hell everything is in the program. I didn't even remember without hunting sometimes where stuff was in 2.79b, now they completely rearranged it all. Completely relearning a program is not conductive to good workflow when you're in the middle of a project. Hell, this is the type of shit that keeps people from switching programs, having to learn a brand new interface. But, Blender has gone and totally changed it in the same program. I think this is even worse than the 2.49 to 2.5+ changes they did.

Comparatively, Lightwave 10:



Lightwave 2018:



As you can see, there are some added tools, but no major changes between LW10 and 2018. Even LW9 just had a different color scheme, it was otherwise the same. I'm not sure about earlier than that. But, that's the kind of consistency this hobby (and industry) relies on.

ugh collections, just gotta snowflake and not keep a unified naming scheme. sheesh. It is a growing issue in opensource, a consistency or uneven dev of something. And always the meh quit abandon ware scenario.

I still cannot see why blender has no way to control smoothing by group ID on a polysurface. Tot6ally eliminates a control and modeling aspect that could be open to users. IU mean how do you keep a sharp edge on a subdiv object without it or denote regions and control say a exact dai of a hole in a subdiv object without it. As a single smoothing ID you end up with shapes that shrink or grow post subdiv. In the end you have to use loops and live with hugely bloated meshes as theres tonnes of bunched edges in corners and direction changes.

Yeah, the problem with open source is that it can lack direction. New people, new ideas come in and they decided it's good to go a new way. You get less of this with paid software, particularly with something you pay a lot of money for. Companies that are making money on this stuff don't want to piss off their customers as much. And, sometimes, when they do, you find the next version goes back to what was popular before.

However, the advantage of open source is this:

https://download.blender.org/release/

That's every version of Blender ever released. You don't have to be stuck with the newer version, you can download whatever version(s) you liked better. If I don't like something like the render engine in LW2018, I can download LW10 because I own it. However, I can't go back and get LW11 (legitimately) due to the fact that Newtek no longer sells it. Effectively, it's not available to me.

Quote from: scifidude79 on Jul 27, 2019, 10:08 pmSo, yeah, I'm on a bit of a Dracual kick.

That sounds good to me!

Quote from: scifieric on Jul 28, 2019, 04:33 pmThat sounds good to me!

Me too. I'm probably going to read the original Bram Stoker novel again. It's been years.

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And, on a more CGI related note, this thing is a damn pain in the ass to do. (attached) It's a very odd shape, nowhere near as straightforward as some might think. I believe the originals were hand sculpted. I chose subdivision for my method of attack. The rest of the nacelle is actually easier than the front. But, this is all I have done on it as motivation wasn't high over the weekend. I'll be picking at it all week, though. This is just a sneak peek.

Nice job so far!

At least you were working in 3D.  I was reading and taking tests to maintain my credentials as an X-ray and MRI technologist.  Ugh.

At least you have a job that pays well.

I've been thinking lately of doing the Phase II Enterprise concept again. I've done it before and in fact was working on a model of the ship almost two years ago. I couldn't find that model on any of my backup drives, so I figured it was lost. Well, as luck would have it, I got a new game controller. I'm tired of playing games on a little monitor, so I decided to hook my gaming computer up to my TV. I pulled one of my earlier desktops out of mothballs to use as a regular desktop, as I'll probably keep the gaming rig hooked up to my TV. When I went to boot it, I saw it had no operating system. No problem, that's an easy fix. I saw the drive had a backup partition on it, and plenty of unpartitioned space, so I decided to leave the partition alone and proceeded to install MX Linux on the unpartitioned space. It's a good thing I did that, because there were several files on that backup partition, including some Blender files. As luck would have it, one of the folders contains my Phase II model project from 2017. So, I installed Blender 2.79b from the MX Linux repositories and took at look at it. Naturally, I did some renders to assess the current state of the model:









It doesn't look too bad. It looks like I had a lot of the painful stuff out of the way. The saucer grid lines need to be redone. I'm not sure how thick they are, but they look pretty thick. I also don't like certain other aspects of them. If memory serves, I tried a different method with them and it didn't work like I wanted it to work. But, those are easy to redo. The warp pylons also have something funky going on with them, but I can easily redo those as well. The nacelles and secondary hull both look good, which is what really matters.

NICE!  I was always fascinated with that ship.  And your take on it is terrific.  I want to see how you keep going with this.

Thanks Eric. I've got some ideas to make it look like a natural stepping stone between TOS and TMP.

Quote from: scifidude79 on Aug 17, 2019, 09:56 pmThanks Eric. I've got some ideas to make it look like a natural stepping stone between TOS and TMP.

I can't wait to see!

I redid the grid lines on the saucer. I did them the same way I did my 24th century cruiser's lines, but these went faster because I had less of them to do. I was able to do one section, then clone and rotate that and join them until I had a quarter of the saucer, the just mirror that along the X and Y axis. I also started on the bridge and planetary sensor array. Those were a bit of a pill to do because Jefferies' drawings of the ship don't match between views. I got it to a point where it's between matching up closely enough with various views and the photos of the miniature being built by Brick Price. I would assume they were working with a more refined set of blueprints to make the 4 foot miniature.





My rationale for fitting this design into Starfleet is simple: They were already working on upgrading the Constitution class before the Enterprise came in for its refit. They had already done a redesign and had built and possibly even refitted some ships into this design by then. Then, when Scott and his team set about redesigning and refitting the Enterprise, they refined the design. This ship could still have been in service, though, as a variant of the Constitution class. Really, this is art imitating life as it fits with how the ship was done for the show and movie. Matt Jefferies came in to do the redesign of the Enterprise for Phase II. His design was then used and further refined by Richard Taylor and Andrew Probert for the version we saw in TMP. Since we didn't see all of the ships in Starfleet, it's possible there were ones like the Phase II ship creeping around in the 2270s. But, I will maintain that it was probably a more rare refit, perhaps five to ten vessels were done in this configuration. There is precedent for more rare versions of ships. The rarely seen Enterprise-B version of the Excelsior, for example. Even after Generations hit theaters, we still only saw one other ship in this configuration. The rest of the Excelsior class ships we saw were the original design. So, it's possible only a small number of Excelsior class ships were done in that design. It may have simply been a sub class specific to a select few ships used for special purposes. That same kind of refit logic can be applied to the Phase II refit Constitution. Perhaps it just wasn't as desirable of a refit as the TMP ship.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on this.

New warp pylons. I had some errors on the old ones. I probably could have fixed it by triangulating the faces, but I decided to just build new ones and make some slight improvements.

Excellent work, Chris!  This is looking great!