VEK! I was just passing through and I saw an amazing sight... Grandeur-A with her top off!! SHE IS SO HOT!! You are doing a great job, buddy! Thanks for the dedication and the skill making our girl a contender with the ships of the line! CHEERS!!
Well, it's not much, but I figured I had to show something to prove that this project is still alive. With the way my schedule is these days, I can't make any promises, but I am working hard to put together a whole batch of new WIPs before the end of this weekend. Stay tuned.
Vector, Man o man. What a killer, wonderful ship. What blows me away is your design skill, with all the related elements echoed throughout the design. And the little details are fantastic. One thing I kept thinking of as I read through this is "what a wonderful/memorable "character-icon" this ship would make in a television series or movie. It really stands out and defines a whole new design ethic to the Trek world. Maybe it's the flowing curves and proportions. I could see a Vance toolkit based on this! That would be fun. I have to agree with another post, something to the effect that "Star Trek fans make better ships than the TV/movie people do." Outside of the StarTrek universe, I'd love to see your designs for a sports car, or boat, or a coffee maker for that matter! Awsome work.
Got quite a bit done on the primary hull this weekend. Some of you might find it interesting to know that the hull panels were created by extruding and beveling the gaps between them inward, not by extruding the panels outward. Either way, it's a tedious pain in the butt, but probably not anywhere near as bad as the windows are going to be.
Nope. If you look closely, you'll see that the Little Blue Guy is still on-duty next to the bridge module.
Wow you are right he is next to the bridge. Glad to see the Secondary Navigational Deflector back up on the ship, I missed it from the previous version so long ago. Now if we get the 2 Wyvern V Anti-Recoil Proto-Cannons on the bow of the ship, it will be nearly complete to what it was before the changes again. Almost time for another spin around animation or maybe the standard 5 view shots, front, back, side, top and bottom all in one pic, again after the cannons are added. Just thinking out loud, post what ever you like, I am content whatever it is
<squints> Oh, yeah... there he is! BTW... I LOVE the shine on the razor... I mean phaser strips! That looks awesome!
That in a nutshell is why I tend to avoid drawing anything "post movie-era", all those windows, lifeboat hatches and whatnot are an absolute nightmare! Just getting the windows on the Korolev to look right in all the views was a headache unto itself and that's nothing compared to something the size of say a Galaxy-Class. As for the latest WIP, there's something about that deflector that makes me wonder what it'd look like in yellow, Sovvie style.
Don't get too enamoured of them. I rather like the shine myself, but it's going to wind up being dulled at least a little by a normal map I'm going to use to create the ribbed appearance common to later era phaser strips. And in answer to a question you posed some time ago, I am still debating several different approaches for texturing this baby. So far I am modeling a lot of surface details like panel lines, which opens the possibility of using just a few stock textures and tiling them over various parts of the ship. Unfortunately, this doesn't work for area specific texture details and also limits a lot of the weathering effects I like to include for added realism. The alternative is to do hi-res, "wall-to-wall" surface textures, but those come at a price, mainly memory limitations and render time depending on how close to the model you want to be able to get. I don't know. I think I'm pretty good at actually creating textures but I'm pretty much a novice when it comes to the techniques of actually applying them to a 3D model, so I would appreciate any and all suggestions from those who are more experienced than I.
Well, technically this model is already a lot further along in overall detail than any previous version, but I get what you’re saying. Probably not any time soon. Animation, in particular, is very time consuming and I would rather spend it completing the model. I am also trying to avoid giving any more really dramatic, wide-angle views of the ship in order to preserve a little something for the big reveal of the completed model at some far-off, long anticipated point in the future.