Mostly roughing out panel lines decals etc for the neck. The dark bits will be inset panels and should not be so dark when done. Great fun will be planning out room in there with all the mechanical bits. older updates mostly attempts to get rid of that ugly noise seen in the last post
Neck stuff. yeah there are a few odd turned edges, like the one near the docking port. Still undecided what to do with the details there.
Ok one side of windows done with rooms. . . . ugh lol I have the other side cut too but not extruded etc. So hopefully unless I cop out after food, I will have the neck interiors and windows done. Images first one is to show volume in the neck and adjoining spaces. I added in geometry for misc machine stuff vs eyeballing it. So blue tubes are turbolifts, pink is data trunkline, green is sundries, red is mains conduit. Or whatnot really only the blues are definitely turbolifts, the rest you can whatever it. Large fushia box is the core and impulse assemblies while the 2 pink tubes are deflector systems and main warp core placements. I doubt any of these will get close enough to thing to worry over windowed rooms getting in the way of it but meh only wasted 10min or so setting it up. Second image is a bit of a mess but it is just the internal space shapes and the window geo, last image is everything neck related unhidden. There are no interior light fixtures yet so rooms are just lit by night strips and any consoles that happen to be showing and whatever is leaking in past the window panes from the omnis outside. Oh of note likely the rear facing windows will not be done for a while, least until I plan out whatever surfacing details I want back there as atm that blue stuff is a bit plain and I am not sold on just that for detail with some decals. But who knows maybe I might be cheap and cop out! O_o;'
Windows rooms and lights are in. Yes, some leaks here and there but that is because I dropped settings to control render times, some. . . . Need to tune the lights in the rooms to dim a few down I think.
have you ever done (hope this is okay to comment on your thread), something like the Kelvin ship except with two nacelles, one top, one bottom? I saw that ship in TOS era Starfleet Command, and was wondering if its something they just created for that video game. Anyways, you do a really great job. It was fun to look at some of your pictures. From the looks of it, you have a great hand at both art and computer drafting and 3d modeling... when I was in school for a technician associates we did autocad but it wasn't terribly easy... even though we had a simple object that had sides that were the same with other views... You ever consider using a 3d printer to print out your designs for sculpture? (I mean for like the "little ships" in the ready room of your conference room) I did cardboard "repurposing" for sculpture... a bit too much sometimes for my clumsy hands and short attention span.
The Balmung is a wonderful "Lost Era" ship, and this refit is looking just the ticket! Having said that, I'm sad to see that the original gold deflector surround has gone, but then I've been a fan of that little touch of luxury since around the time the 2012 Ships of the Line calendar was released
Is there any way to combine smart, beautiful 3D imagery like this with video and music to create a travel pod "unveiling" like what we saw in the travel pod scenes in TMP1 and TMP4? It would be great to see something like this come to life.
I do not have the spare cash to spend on 3d printers and I have no trust in any "service" out there as all have dubious track records at respecting ownership and security of the files used. Add in modeling for 3d printing is nothing like modeling for animation or HQ 3d stills. Someday when I can afford the 800+ to get into it I might take the plunge to itch my old physical scratch building itches. But as I have gotten older all those glues, resins, fumes, and paints irritate the hell out of my lungs. I do not do game models so no I have not done anything like you mention. I have had others make models for games from my designs with and without permission. As for design I usually avoid vertical nacelles as they break the Roddenberry rules. Namely line of sight of the nacelle hull or percentage of. I also model based on the idea of the nacelles coils creating a distorted magnetic bubble IE think of a M&M this does not lead to vertical arrangements and account for the saucer widths. Almost all my ships will fit in a squashed stretched sphere. Autocad does a lot more than a 3d app as it is meant for milling a real object so there are a lot of things in it that are very different. It has taken a good 10yrs of off and on hobby modeling for me to get where I am now. Most of my early ships were just a tonne of simple shapes stuck together, however back then we did not have subdivision nor poly modeling tools. Just distortion modifiers and boolean. This is a redo not a refit, pretty much reconning the old model. I had planned to make the surround on the deflector to be gold but it was a bit too much in your face. I had also considered adding gold/brass details on some of the bits around it. I just haven't gotten to these parts enough to apply the materials yet. A way is to donate a 8890 zenon multi cpu server box or a 6950x build. My poor 4770k probably would take 3 months to render out anything like that. Do wonder how well max will scale core wise as they DO have those xenon phi cpus with 72cores and 288threads! I have seen a multi cpu zenon chew through some heavy renders like it was realtime game cgi. I probably would do more rendering for animation if I did not have so many recent systems die on me that were sort of still relevant. ATM my old i7 is to busy as a server while the media pc is used too often and I cannot have week long downtime on my main system. Good example of time frame the close up full ship renders (3rd image in the next post) with the current settings which are low take 50min. For laughs some potato hdw.
Rearward windows and details. PITA as I did have to merge up some rooms. I irk a bit at how close some of these are to the impulse but there so far is a load of room for the exhaust flow. From what I have read the impulse fascia here is a heat sink and waste dump and not a thrust surface. Everything light wise in the neck are all needs a bit of tuning. Some rooms have too much light exp the warm toned rooms. ATM it will be tuned by adjusting the objects vs the lum materials. Other rooms are a bit too uneven for the type of room they are. Say those rear facing lounge rooms (large windows) ugh 50min UUUGHHH 1hr 43min and yes, I have yet to turn that edge near the docking port.
Started messing about with the impulse mostly an unoriginal housing idea as it is a lot like the one on the Probert Ambassador class. smaller array of grills. Just a glowing pit with stencil over. Really feeling the itch to work on something new or the construction of shapes vs busy work like details and windows.
I have a couple silly questions. Does the primary hull (saucer section) have a dedicated impulse engine? If I understand what you're doing here, the interconnecting dorsal (the neck) is where your impulse engine is located, making it part of the secondary hull (star drive section). Can Balmung separate?
I usually do not do separations on my ships in general. The neck was a handy place to stick the impulse drive without having a blister hanging off the saucer section allowing for clearance for that shuttle bay on the saucer.
H deck holes drilled. AKA more of the same. At this point I have to decide if I will do any large windows on the rim and where I should place them either on the curvature or across the stripes.
Sampler of the larger window groups. Lighting needs tuning. probably wont get much further as dinner always interrupts the rest of the evening.
I am doing this in quarters to ease the monotony of clean up and building the back wall structure of each window. I happened to get it done last night just had a larger render that did not pan out going overnight. I did weed it some too as my original layout had what I felt a bit too many windows.
Rest of the rim windows are done. BLEAH I have an entire secondary hull to look forward to and the whole underside saucer. SHUDDER. Least this is a Ambassador era ship and not a TNG era one or I would have had to do twice as many of these things. As this thing renders I am wondering if I should bump those forward lifeboats and move the registry onto that row of panels to space it and the ship name out more. But then I dunno where I would stick those 10 lifeboats. I cannot easily move them up or down as they will interfere with rooms or later elements such as phasers. I am also about to nix all the physical cut aztec or adjust the materials to not conflict as much under bright light.