I must say that I do quite like the look of it particularly from certain angles. Even more so with shadowing it to give more realistic form and presence. When I was scaling it I used the TOS Class F design as a benchmark of sorts in terms of scale. In that regard I was trying to get the cabin width to be roughly similar as well as maintain some space between the cabin inner bulkhead and the outer hull for mechanical guts. Now I see that with the bulges on the lower sides I don't need quite as much space as I allowed between hulls and the cabin can be a bit more narrow than the Class F design. It has to be said that the TAS onscreen version was ridiculously long and narrow, so my version wasn't going to be exactly the same. But I think I can afford to narrow it in the middle section without touching the rest of the design and it will look better, though still not as narrow looking as the TAS version. Part of it may also be a matter of getting used to it. We'll see.
It would be fairly easy to narrow that. Take half the model and use the push/pull tool on the flat face of the bi-section.
I'm not sure it's that simple. There are no true flat surfaces *well maybe one or two small ones) as all the large surfaces are compound curves and those are connected to edges and corners that are rounded.
Thanks. I'm learning a lot with this. Although it mightn't be apparent to some there are things I've learned to do and not to do in future projects. As for this design itself I definitely want to make the middle of the main hull section a bit narrower and I'm not satisfied with the aft access hatch. I will one day redesign that. But I rather like the rest of it overall.
I don't think you understand. The ship is cut in half. the plane where the 2 halves meet is flat. use the push/pull tool on it. If it's not perfectly flat, use a flat plane and intersect it, trimming the imperfect surface and leaving a flat surface. Delete the un-needed parts leaving a flat plane. My desktop PC is down right now, otherwise I would create an image showing what I mean.
I think I understand. I am trying to section it now, but I'm periodically running into a problem that some others have complained about with the latest Sketchup 8. It's running maddeningly slow at times. I'm trying to keep things simple and I don't have anything else running. I have a brand new iMac with 8GB RAM. It shouldn't be a problem, but it seems to be the program itself. I understand that this is being worked on, but for now it can be a pain in the ass.
Sorry to hear that, must be a Mac issue. My PC (before it died yesterday) could easily handle files with half a million faces, and it was an Athlon 64 FX2 with 4gb I built about 5 years ago.
From what I understand some experience it (Mac wise) and some don't. And apparently some with PC have hit it too. I think it might have more to do with OSX Lion rather than the hardware.
What's the difference here? I managed to section and remove about nine percent of the width of the main hull from the centreline area. Why nine percent? Well there was some under hull detail I wanted to preserve without redoing it all over again and I managed to pull it off. I think I still have to remake the aft hatch access, but that's simpler than the under hull detail. I think it looks a bit better balanced visually. And yet...yet...I find myself torn between the two... Opinions?
I prefer the original wide version, this looks a little too thin now. Shuttles are transports, they should have a bit of bulk about them.
Looks fine to me... Change the background to black (if you don't mind). The model is washing out too much...
You know it's really beginning to bug me. I've learned I'm not the only one with this periodic problem, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating. Seems there's an issue with Sketchup 8 on Mac in that at times it can run really friggin' slow. And from what I understand upgrading to Pro want make any difference. I know it's being worked up, but in the interim it's really pissing me off. The problem crops up (or I should say the spinning beach ball of death appears) usually when I'm trying to intersect two groups or faces. Everything is fine and then it's WHAM as if I've run into a wall. Sometimes it only goes on for a few minutes, but there have been other times when I've let it run for over half an hour before I force quit out of frustration and try again. And this happens even when I make sure I don't have any other programs or applications or even Sketchup panels open. I also try to keep things simple so I'm only trying to interest the necessary faces. Windows users don't seem to have this issue and Sketchup on Mac OSX Leopard or Snow Leopard don't appear to have a problem either. It appears to be limited to some running OSX Lion. And it doesn't matter that my computer is a brand new (last summer) iMac with a recently upgraded RAM to 8GB from 4GB. Note it did this when I had only 4GB so the RAM upgrade didn't make any appreciable difference. So I seriously doubt upgrading yet again to 16GB would matter. Aargh!!!
The colour you're seeing in the images are essentially the colours I'm aiming for. The main colour will be light grey even though it can appear almost white or darker in some places. Thats pretty much what the Galileo also looked like colour wise onscreen so that should give this design some conformity with TOS' "reality." The red of the Starfleet pennants isn't the same as the red on the nacelle domes. And note that the nacelle domes on the Galileo were not red but white (or at least look white onscreen) and so I might experiment with this. Other colours included are a goldfish colour for the navigational deflector and I'm going to add a slight cyan tint to the service access panels to make them a bit more noticeable without being obtrusive. The only black on the model is the lettering, and even there it's not pure black because I want the letters to look ever so slightly faded along with the pennants. The rest of what appears to be black (the viewport and the rings behind the red nacelle domes) are actually charcoal or very very dark grey.In the viewport's case it looks smoked because it's a bit transparent. The real trick for painting the model will be adding some weathering so it doesn't look right out of the factory.
Are you able to do image mapping in the free version of Sketchup? I didn't think it could do much in the way of using image maps to control things like bump, specularity, glossiness, etc.
I'm not sure. I haven't learned all its capabilities. I do know that to export DWG files and the like I would need Sketchup Pro. On the flip side I can import files from Illustrator. I wish I'd known that in the beginning as it would have made some things easier in terms of recreating exact shapes and dimensions as I had initially designed and drawn them. But of course you learn as you go. A little aft strut detailing.