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Started by scifidude79, May 27, 2019, 12:21 am

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scifidude79

Thanks Dean.

I got a bit more done on the ship. I added some panel lines to the upper saucer and some blue stuff to the nacelles.



Prime_8

nice lines man.


The 'blue stuff' (or any other color emissive ) makes things start to look alive

scifieric

Nice blue stuff!  LOL!

Looking great, Chris!
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scifidude79

scifidude79

It's not much, but I've been playing with a possible way of adding text to the ship using the heat shrink tool in Lightwave. I've never used this tool before, but I like it. I may or may not go this route for the final text, but this at least gives me a look at the placement of the text and a visual guide for where it's going to be when I want to add other details. The only minor drawback to this method is that it "floats" slightly over the hull and casts a shadow, but that's an easily fixed issue. Other methods include simply texturing it or actually stenciling it onto the hull. Anyway, I did some renders to see how it looks, so I might as well share them.



scifieric

It looks great, Chris!  That's the way I added text to my last three models.  I disable shadows for the text objects and it seems to work great!
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scifidude79

Thanks Eric. Yeah, disabling the shadows is the plan. When I collapse the mesh, I'll have to leave the text/decal layer alone. It's not hard to do, I do that with my blades for my TOS bussard collectors.

Freak

I do the same thing here.

Looks great Chris.
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scifidude79

scifidude79

I took a week off of work, so I'm enjoying a nice staycation. One thing on the agenda for this week is some CGI. I toyed with the idea of starting a new project. I considered doing a new Constellation class, or even an Ambassador class, which I've never done before. However, the idea of working on other peoples' designs just isn't exciting me right now. So, I decided to go back to my 24th century frigate I was working on several months ago. Tentatively, it's still named the USS Sunstreaker, but that may change.

Anyway, upon reopening the file, I found I was in the process of adding grid lines to the ship. The last time I'd worked on it, I'd really only done the upper saucer. Well, I did the lower saucer and secondary hull. The only other parts that for sure are going to get lines are the bridge and spine, and the pylon. Though, technically, I started on the pylon piece as it's connected to part of the underside of the saucer. But, there's more to do there. I haven't decided if the nacelles are getting any lines. I checked to be sure and there aren't a whole lot of Starfleet nacelles that have engraved lines. (almost none from the TNG era) I also made the beginnings of the saucer RCS thrusters. I also changed the hull color to battleship gray and made the RCS thrusters gunmetal gray.




(yes, I see the smoothing error on the back of the saucer, I'm just not worried about it as that part isn't finished)





So, yeah, plenty more to do on this ship. Once I'm done with the tedious and time consuming grid lines, I'll probably do the tedious and time consuming windows. Though, the ship isn't going to have a huge amount of windows, as it is a warship.

scifidude79

I just couldn't wait to add some windows, so I didn't wait. Trying to remember how to do things that are out of the norm for the projects I do can be rough. For example, I mainly deal in circular saucers. That's great, but this is an extreme half oval. So, rotating window cutters into place isn't a simple matter of using the rotate tool. I have to use other tools. There's a handy tool in Lightwave called Rail Clone, which is great for creating duplicates of an object along a path. Similarly, Rail Extrude extrudes objects along a path (comes in handy for phaser strips and other bits.) However, the problem was trying to remember how to convert a line of verts into a path. Well, I finally got it and I got my first row of windows in place. The Rail Clone tool got me partly there, with some fiddling with the cutters by hand to get them exactly how I want them. Of course, the complex curves made it a bit of work, but I think the results speak for themselves. The windows are shaped like the ones on Voyager, Equinox, etc. Basically, just slightly rounded rectangles. The later shows and movies essentially did away with the round and pill shaped windows, until Enterprise brought them back.





So yeah, these are basically skylights. The extreme angle of the saucer makes it so they couldn't be anything else. I'll probably only do a couple more rows of these on the saucer top and then some windows you can look normally out of on the saucer edge. I may do something similar to a Ten forward. I'd do some of those window insets that various ships in the TNG era had, but the extreme curve again makes it so they'd be really odd to do. This ship has more of a "blade" type of saucer than ships like Voyager and Equinox, which had less extreme of a curve that allowed for more details like that. But, that's because this is supposed to be a fast and maneuverable fighting ship. I don't know how making a ship short and sleek helps in space, but I think it would alter the center of gravity, making tight maneuvers possible. I'm pretty sure that's why the Defiant was designed how it was.

scifieric

Excellent work, Chris!  This is certainly fun to watch.

I presume that regular physics kind of goes out the window (if you'll pardon the expression) at warp speed, so I've always had it in my mind that the windows and such for the ships, heck, even the shape of the ships, are just to give us something familiar to latch onto as a viewer.  Oh, that's a Spaceship!  I can gauge the size by the windows!  (That sort of thing.)

You're doing a great job and I can't wait to see it finished.
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scifidude79

Thanks Eric.

Yeah, windows help establish scale. From a more realistic standpoint, being able to look outside kind of helps alleviate that feeling of being "trapped." Other than that, I don't know what purpose they serve. Glowy bits to make the ship look cool?

scifidude79

More windows, some phasers, photon torpedo launchers and a couple sensor arrays.



scifidude79

I decided to take a break from modeling and do some texture work. I created some paneling for the upper saucer. This is pretty easy to do. I took my saucer from an earlier file, without grid lines or windows, etc, and I applied different materials to the geometry to come up with a panel pattern that exactly matches my hull shape. Then I rendered that with an orthographic camera and used planar projection to map it to the upper saucer. I also made the name part of the texture, rather than being modeled text.