TOS Star Trek Builds

[scifidude79]

I hate making this thing. It's probably my least favorite shape to make on this whole ship. I'm just glad there are apparently no smoothing errors.

[scifidude79]

The modeling is done on the Connie. Up next are the materials.

[scifieric]

Holy cow, that was FAST!  It also looks just beautiful, Chris!

[scifidude79]

Thanks Eric.

[scifidude79]

The materials are coming along. I've tried to mach the colors of the ship from the TV show as best I can. Of course, nobody really knows what the colors were 50+ years ago. I used Gary Kerr's painting guide for the ship, as Gary has tried his best to match what the colors were. Two places where I'll definitely go off of canon, sort of, are with hull paneling and weathering. If you count TOS Remastered, the paneling is canon. My paneling will be subtle, but I want it to be there for realism and for looks. Another realism choice I'm making is to not do all that weathering they did on the TOS Enterprise. The reason for this is that it's unrealistic that a ship is going to get dirty flying through space. While the are things that will mark up your hull, that would mean that the hull integrity is compromised and that would be fixed at a Starbase. But, there aren't really any circumstances where a ship will pick up dirt flying through space. There just isn't going to be dirt in concentrations in a vacuum. Even nebula gas isn't as tightly concentrated as it's depicted on these shows. Also, the navigational deflector and other systems would keep most of that stuff off of your hull. While it is canon that the TOS ship has all that weathering, it's also keeping in universe to not do it, as other ships don't have all that. Back in the '60s, nobody really knew much about space travel. Astronauts were actually kept in quarantine when they returned in case they picked up any illnesses in space. Obviously, it was later realized that didn't happen and that practice was dropped. I believe the weathering was applied for the same reason, because they didn't know any better. It's possible that, when they had more scientific advisors in the 1970s and onward that someone let them know that the ship wouldn't pick up all that crap flying through space.

So, with all that, this is where it stands:









The bussards are a work in progress, but I like how they're going so far. Also, ignore the sensor domes, that was an experiment that didn't work so well. For textures, I'll have 10 4K maps to make; color and specular maps for the saucer top, saucer bottom, engineering hull, and both nacelles. I've also got a couple smaller maps to make, for the teardrop and underneath the shuttlebay, as both have markings on them that will need to be textured. Also, I may do a texture for the impulse vents. Everything else is just going to be the colors they are. This pretty much matches the paint that's done on physical models, as it's usually just a solid color. There's no need to texture solid colors. 😉

[Freak]

Looking Good!

[scifidude79]

Thanks Dean.

This is a render I did to test how the bussards look, and I think I finally got them were I want them. I also got the color map done for the saucer top. I'm probably going to lighten the grid lines a lot. They're correctly colored for graphite, though, which is a nod to them being put on with pencil on the original ship.

[scifieric]

I'm getting jealous!  Excellent work, Chris!  Great job!

[scifidude79]

Thanks Eric. No need to be jealous, though. You're one of the people who sets the gold standard when it comes to doing this ship in CGI.

[scifieric]

Thanks Eric. No need to be jealous, though. You're one of the people who sets the gold standard when it comes to doing this ship in CGI.

Uh, holy crap!  Thank you, my friend!

[scifidude79]

I got the color maps done. For the most part, this is all easy stuff to do. Though, some things are more of a pain, like getting the stupid little numbers on the engineering hull close to where they needed to be. But, stuff like that happens when you put stuff onto a tube and you're working from flat images.









All that's left to do on this one is the spec maps, which shouldn't take too long. I can usually knock out some paneling rather quickly. Also, I need to add a material to my window boxes to make it look like the ship has an interior. I'll probably do a procedural texture for that.

[scifieric]

Absolutely terrific-looking work!

[scifidude79]

Thanks Eric.

I decided not to do any paneling on the ship. It's not hard to do or anything, I just really like how the ship looks. Besides, I went through so much to try and match the colors of the ship in the Smithsonian, why make it look totally different with some hull panels? So, I'm calling this done (for now.) I decided to render some beauty shots. I did a few renders with a single light, and a pass from each camera with the light turned off to use as illumination passes. I had the ship shots saved to .png files, so I dropped those against a starfield I made in GIMP a couple years ago, comped in my illumination passes, and we have some beauty shots:









For those who like specs:

Length: 288.6 meters
Width: 127.8 meters
Height: 69.3 meters

For those who are wondering, I took the blueprints and selected the ship only, then took the dimensions of the sheets, converted the pixels to meters, then created a cube with those dimensions. I then scaled the ship up to the canon length of 288.6 meters. That means the generally accepted canon width of 127.1 meters is slightly off, and the height of 72.6 meters is significantly off. And, it's not a symptom of the blueprints I'm using, I've done the same thing with other blueprints, all of which were created by taking measurements of the model, and I always get a height of over 69 meters, but less than 70. So, I don't know where the 72.6 meters came from. (and I don't really care)

371,802 polygons
9 texture maps (least amount I've done on a model in ages)

All told, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Aside from not thinking the panels were going to look right, I also concluded that there's no reason you can't paint a ship in solid colors. If you look at real world examples, Navy ships are typically solid gray. I decided to keep the shine levels low, but not quite flat like the paint on the original ship. It's got a kind of satin finish to it. The only really shiny bits are the glass domes and metallic parts.

Anyway, that's what I have. I'll be kitbashing this thing to create more models.

[scifieric]

Chris, that is DAMNED pretty!

[scifidude79]

Thanks Eric.