Absolutely wonderful Vektor. Just so awesome. I find the bussard collectors interesting. Why did you decide to go with that texture over the traditional spinning fan-blades look?
I've been doing a lot more sketching since I got myself a Wacom tablet, so you may get your wish eventually.
Because I rescaled this entire model a while back to real world units and the old setup I was using for the bussard collectors didn't survive the transition, what with falloff values for the blinking lights and such. I simply haven't gotten around to reconstructing the effect. I did, however, manage to get it looking pretty good on my Kiaga model, so I will probably just transfer that over to this one at some point when I have the time.
Excellent! (It works better if you read that with a british accent. I'm not british, though. It just works better.)
Vektor, As usual, your artistry and eminent good taste leave me nearly speechless. (Not an easy thing to do.) I can only pray you've been secretly retained by Paramount to design the new ship and you're holding back due to some non-disclosure agreement. Your design philosophy for updating the look of the original is wonderful: Respectful, well considered and visually inspired. Bravo! M. P.S.: Thanks for the desktop renders. Keep 'em comin'!
Aren't those fanatastic? I bought one a couple of years back (was dating a woman who did photography... didn't want to buy it for her, but though it was cool and I could "loan" it to her when she needed it). I use it a lot, mainly in CorelDraw or Corel PhotoPaint, though I've been led to believe that it's possible to use one of these in ZBrush (haven't figured out how yet... but I've barely learned my way around the UI in ZBrush and can't really do anything in there anyway, yet!). I got the 8x10 version... the pressure-and-angle-sensitive one as well. I only have the basic "art pen" and the mouse (both of which came with it) but I've been thinking that the "airbrush" might be useful... it works a lot differently than the pen and it's hard to get the "airbrush" functionality to work well with a pen, I've found, in Corel. But once you've used a "pen" instead of a mouse to try to draw... you can never go back!
I've never used any of the Mental Ray materials... that's at a depth I've never quite gotten down to. (Though I'm using Maya, and I'm not sure that there are the same "mental-ray-specific" materials in there, since the software is quite a bit different in terms of how it models materials) Is this something built into Mental Ray's renderer, or are you using the stand-alone version?
Well, that would be nice, but I’m afraid I have to dash your hopes. I am optimistic, however, that the ship in the film may turn out to be more reminiscent of the original design than most people think.
Yeah, I’m really enjoying it, though the disconnect between where your hand is and where your eyes are takes a little getting used to. I was pretty happy with my entry in the Trek Art Comic Project, though, which was done entirely on the Wacom tablet just days after I bought it, so I guess I got used to it pretty fast. Eventually, I’d like to step up to a Cintiq or another tablet with the integral display, but I don’t have an extra couple of grand laying around at the moment.
Not sure I understand your question. Mental Ray is nothing but a renderer. It can run within a program like 3ds Max, which is what I use, or it can run as a standalone application for batch processing or on a separate computer for use as a render farm. I have Max installed on four computers at home, though only one is licensed for use as an actual workstation; the rest are rendering machines. As of 3ds Max 2009, there are two main groups of materials designed for use specifically with Mental Ray: The Architecture and Design library, and the Pro Materials library. Both provide a variety of optimizations and unique features via Mental Ray, but they will not work at all with the regular scanline renderer. As far as I know, the Mental Ray renderer for Maya is identical to the one for Max, though the interface and the way some of the features are implemented may be somewhat different.
Well, in Maya, Mental Ray is provided in a fully-integrated fashion... I have no "stand-alone" capacity. And, again, in Maya, I have the ability to create complex "material" networks, but I know of no way I can make use of any "built into Mental Ray" materials which are independent of the Maya type materials. Doesn't mean it's not there, just that I haven't discovered it. Then again, these programs are REALLY deep (and I think Maya is moreso than some others), and I'm doing this as a hobbyist, not professionally (though I strongly believe that what I'm learning "as a hobbyist" now will end up serving me very well in the future, as the line between "engineering software" and "rendering software" continues to fade away). Exactly what I was getting at. I have not found anything in Maya which renders only in one renderer... well, except for "hardware particles" of course, but I can set those up to emit software elements in turn, and get equivalent, or even better, effects than I'd get with the hardware ones anyway (though at, as always, a big performance hit!). So, I suspect that what we're looking at there is an issue with how the renderers are hooked into the software. I suspect that if I had the stand-alone Mental Ray version, I'd have some way of using that same library... but as far as I can determine, this doesn't exist in the "integrated with Maya" version. Then again, if someone knows better... please correct me!
My experience with Maya is that it's by far the most controllable of the mainstream packages, if you can dig deep enough. However, for the average user, it's extremely weak on the basic side of things. The potential's there, but you have to really know what you're doing. The main thing that I like about Lightwave is its price, and the fact that the modeler is split from the animator/renderer. That takes some getting used to, but it's nice. However, the lack of any kind of batch render outside of network rendering, or anything resembling scene states or render layers (Max and Maya relatively speaking) really hurts it. Of the "Big 3", I find that Max has the best mix of power and useability (though this may be because I've got more experience with it than the other progs, and have been using it for longer. ) But the non-node-based material system really hurts it big-time, and I don't understand why they still use such an obsolete system, especially since it's particle system is node-based, and one of the best out there. I can get a nice plugin to make it do node-based materials, but that's not a perfect solution. That said, I much prefer the way it handles lighting compared to Maya, because I feel as if I have a lot more control, useful to me as someone who specializes in lighting. I've also found that Max's default scanline render...well...renders faster than Maya Software, with better looking results. However, I feel that Scene States are much clunkier than Maya's equivalent Render Layers, for the most part, though they also have some advantages as well. The main thing that I'm liking about Max 2009, compared to earlier versions, is the incredible render element support for mental ray, especially the arch&design material. Yowza that's insane. And I love that, using mental ray, I can basically designate any map/map tree as a render element. That'll make rendering self-illumination maps much easier, as I can just designate different maps as different elements with their own output paths, and they'll save out seperately. Right now, I either render out each self-illumination element as its own pass, which is time-expensive, or I render out several maps at once, and then a "matte pass" with each map as a seperate, distinct color, and use that to mask out the bits that I don't want in each pass. Bit easier on render time and disk space perhaps (though the new method will actually be worse on disk space than this...can't have everything), but it's a bit of a pain to set up. Now I can just say "warp drive, render as 'filename_warp#####.exr', windows, impulse engines, etc. etc." Definitely looking forward to playing with that in my next project! I'll stop rambling now, if I must. Ummm...to answer your question Cary, I'm not sure if it is possible to access mental ray's shader library in Maya. I'll have to reinstall Maya and check it out.
This update of the original Coni is utterly amazing. It is so beautifully modest and unpretentious, unlike most refits - a real tribute to Matt Jefferies’ design. If only they would use this for Star Trek XI. Thank you Vector for sharing this with us.
Vektor, If I didn't feel obligated to keep my Alex Ross Obama-as-Superman on my desktop until the election, I'd have this one there in a heartbeat! {ProfJonathan}