NX Refit

What @Mage said. It’s like you flipped a switch and she suddenly came alive!

 

i always loved the NX and the refit. But this is already so much more....more. You know?

 

That hull finish is spectacular. There's something about those smooth but hard lines on the pontoons and saucer superstructure in particular that makes me almost think of a shark's fins and snout. It looks cool, which isn't a term I normally associate with the NX-class.

 

Thanks guys! I've been meaning to do something Enterprise era for a while now, and it's been a fun experience building this model so far.

 

I would have liked to have seen a Kelvinprise with the catamaran/saddle tank structures to either side of the secondary hull with Ambassador like pylons to over-the-saucer nacelles…NX-01 impulse at the roots in addition to Kelvin saucer impulse engines.

 

Really nice work, don't hold back on your usual industrial style.

 

It's getting there. I think the secondary hull will get a little more industrial, since I'm going a bit more off-script on that one relative to the saucer.

 

Sounds good to me.

 

That should have been Columbia, to contrast against Enterprise’s soft copper…Bronze giving way to Iron.

 

I always liked Columbia's look, but I'm imagining this ship as one step further along from the initial NX production run. I kinda think of this model as a Romulan War era NX variant, or a tranche-2 as @Relayer1 put it.

 

A little more on the bridge, and other surrounding greebles -

 

I'm really digging this industrial look. It makes me think WWII submarine for some reason, in a good way.

 

The repeating vents on the top of the saucer superstructure are directly inspired by the water vents in the upper fairings of WW2 submarines. It's a motif I put into a lot of my Star Trek ships.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gato-class_submarine#/media/File:USS_Gato;0821201.jpg


And the catamaran changes are inspired by the f-18 conformal fuel tanks:

 

Y'know, it's threads like this that demonstrate how the existing simple "Like" feature is really quite inadequate.

Is it possible to request a software update to add a "Fucking LOVE IT!" option, maybe?

 

The greebling is superb Just a minor comment that all the extra raised plates might be too much as the ones on the flat area in front of the bridge and saucer start to give the impression that the ship was built with ill-fitting plates or hastily patched over, IMHO.

 

Thanks guys

I'm really trying to take this on board but it goes against my instincts to add variation everywhere. However I'm in the middle of a process to dial back some of the excesses of detail that are present, so that the greebling doesn't detract from the whole. So far, I've slightly lowered some of the raised plates, but not all (that flat area I plain forgot about, so thanks for the reminder!) Some of the cylindrical-ish items dotted around the superstructure are also going to get flatter. Finally, I've modified the main shader so that it's not creating massive highlights on the edge of panels where it catches the light - need to roll that change out to the rest of the mesh objects.

Edit;
I've tucked some of those cylinders in a bit further, levelled off a few more panels, and reduced the brightness variation of the panels a little. All really quick changes, but already looking a bit calmer, I reckon. It's important to me that I get this right, because I want the camera to get close up to the hull like in ENT Season 2's 'Minefield' ep.

 

Bloody hell.......

 

That's looking really great.