Re: Donny's TOS Enterprise Interiors Absolutely. I figure there was at least one minor refit of the Enterprise between TMP and TWOK...seeing that more than ten years pass between the events of the two movies. This would account for the additional "upgrades"...
Re: Donny's TOS Enterprise Interiors On the other hand, the rearranged bridge stations did allow Nick Meyer to get this awesome group shot at the end of the film.
Re: Donny's TOS Enterprise Interiors You are right, it would correspond to Deck 7. Apparently I haven't recovered from my shore leave, yet. IIRC, the Johnson layout was inspired by David Kimble's TMP Enterprise cutaway where we can see the transporter room on the forward port side of Deck 7. The cutaway has some issues with scale, but for any location on Deck 7 the saucer's concave bottom / undercut needs to be considered. This screencap from TMP, showing Kirk outside the transporter room (close to the circular core section of the saucer) illustrates what I consider a problem: Apparently the corridor (with the forced perspective extension painting) stretches out towards the saucer's rim, yet remains unaffected by the saucer's undercut. Admittedly, the slight misalignment of the FP extension near the floor could suggest a moderate ramp, but the upper corridor structures continue to extend straight, which then would suggest the deck height decreases further out. I therefore believe the transporter room would need to be located on a deck where there would be enough space to have such a corridor. Bob
Re: Donny's TOS Enterprise Interiors Spent the better part of the day creating these two fire extinguisher models. We all know that Nicholas Meyer made use of fire extinguishers in both TWOK and TUC, so it would be a sin not to include them in my build. I'm starting to wonder if this obsession with detail is healthy [EDIT: I just noticed that the yellow extinguisher is shorter than the red one, which is an error I will fix] Here they are seen in TWOK: And here are some reference images I was lucky enough to find:
Re: Donny's TOS Enterprise Interiors It definitely is fascinating for us looking at your results, I dare to say. I had no idea such fire extinguisher reference pictures even existed. Did it take longer to find or to build these? Bob
Re: Donny's TOS Enterprise Interiors Of course it is healthy!!!! At least that's what I keep telling myself!!
Re: Donny's TOS Enterprise Interiors obsession with detail is far healther than casual disregard plus stuffing your face with frosted bacon pie.
Re: Donny's TOS Enterprise Interiors It took me longer to build, for sure. I found the reference images over a year ago, pretty easily. Not sure what I searched for, but I came across this site detailing a lot of the props in TOS and the early movies: http://www.racprops.com/trekmovies/wok/
Re: Donny's TOS Enterprise Interiors Very cool prop site. Sadly, they don't have anything on my favorite props from Star Trek III, the electronic ID cards used by the Starfleet Security dude in the bar where he confronted McCoy before taking him to the brig, and the one used by Sulu to subsequently break him out. Been looking for years for info on those things and "just use a modified calculator" was the best anyone could do.
Re: Donny's TOS Enterprise Interiors I really love this unreal engine. This looks great. Are you using lightmaps or does it render lights in real time?
Re: Donny's TOS Enterprise Interiors ^ Which also leads me to ask if the lighting can change? (Red alert, power outage, etc.)
Re: Donny's TOS Enterprise Interiors And to add one more question - how do you create textures? In photoshop? They look great. I do mine in smartdraw, because I don't know how to work in photoshop.
Re: Donny's TOS Enterprise Interiors To answer all the previous questions: Unreal still heavily relies on lightmaps (static lights), and sometimes ugly artifacts can appear as a result (see the shadows at the bottoms of the turbolift panels). Real-time lighting (mobile lights) is possible, however it is very performance draining if not used sparingly. There are new types of lights in Unreal 4 called "stationary" lights, which use a combination of lightmaps and real-time lighting, but they are limited to how much they can be used in a given area. An area, like the corridor, which uses many lights, has to rely mostly on static (lightmapped) lights due to the limitations. In case you are wondering, the light generated from the bottom corridor panels is static lighting, whereas the blue light coming from the ceiling structures of the corridor are stationary lights. I use a combination of all the different types of lights (static, stationary, and mobile) to achieve different results. It should be noted, however, that the screencaps I've shown thus far have been baked with "preview" lighting to save time. The final builds before release will use "production" lighting, which will be of a much higher quality. And yes, BJ, it is possible to simulate red-alert lighting or a power-outage type lighting change in-game. Regarding textures: I am relying more and more on building textures solely through the use of 3ds Max and Unreal 4's material editor. I use 3ds Max to bake ambient occlusion and normal maps from high-poly geometry, then arrange them with various colors, textures, and shader functions in Unreal 4 to create very powerful shaders. I use Photoshop sparingly, mainly for the creation of graphics, decals, and the like. Because the Federation interiors are very clean, I hardly ever need to open Photoshop unless to tweak a texture here and there. If I do a Klingon interior, or something else a little more dirty or natural, then I'll have to rely on Photoshop much more. ZBrush is another powerful texture creation tool, allowing you to paint right onto the models themselves and then extracting that information for textures.
Re: Donny's TOS Enterprise Interiors Man, the refit looks fantastic! Are you planning to release these at some point? I would love to be able to walk around and look at all of this stuff. Especially when the Oculus Rift comes out... that would be incredible to see. -Ricky
Re: Donny's TOS Enterprise Interiors Are you putting your affairs in order now? Saying goodbye to loved ones on the "outside"?
Re: Donny's TOS Enterprise Interiors I think I'll stay away from OR personally. Every single VR headset I've ever used has made me want to wretch my guts out after about 3 minutes of usage, starting with the cold sweats and shaky legs. Sad - if there is anything I would like to have seen in VR it's this.
Re: Donny's TOS Enterprise Interiors In directly related to the discussion...the paneling within the turbolift, did the production "repurpose' some sort of rubberized carpet under-padding? I swear I've seen material like that somewhere else. Sincerely, Bill
Re: Donny's TOS Enterprise Interiors One more question about unreal engine. I have worked with Unity engine, but I also did install Unreal engine. I spent few minutes working in it. In the end I decided that I would use Unity because you could write your own scripts in C# if I recall correctly. Can you do that in Unreal engine?
Re: Donny's TOS Enterprise Interiors In Unreal 4 you can, for sure. You have to pay a monthly subscription to use unreal 4, however. I find it's worth the price.