I'm finally getting the sails buttoned-up and finalized, including the articulating structural details. Still have a ways to go on this but I have committed to delivering it by the end of this weekend, so we'll see.
Yum! I can't wait to see the finished version animated and in action. Dennis -- did you folks ever address whether there's sound in space in your production? Will Polaris make dramatic noises when she's on-screen?
Yes, my health situation is much better. They never did come up with a definite cause for any of it but nearly all of it has gone away over the last few weeks. Here's hoping none of it EVER comes back.
This is the only WIP image for tonight. Lots of progress made today but this just shows a hint of it. More tomorrow.
I was just poking around on your website looking at the old Grandeur sketches. You know, John Eaves should thank his lucky stars you didn't have a portfolio together when Trek production was looking to hire a design artist. I much prefer your style to his.
^^ Agreed... Vektor never aims impulse engines at something important like nacelle pylons and on top of that always comes up with clean looks for his designs. Good to hear your health has improved Vektor. Polaris is looking great, me like BIG engines.. *grunt grunt*
Yay! I like sounds in space, even though I'm fully aware of the inaccuracies. Star Trek 2009 did a great job with space noises, using them to enhance the action where necessary, but also keeping it silent in scenes where it worked to convey a sense of isolation -- like the blowout scene on the Kelvin, or the bit where Kirk, Sulu, and Redshirt went skydiving from the shuttlecraft.
I don't consider it an important question. It's either something that works well for the style of a movie or it doesn't.
Polaris is basically done. I'm really just going through and cleaning up the "trash" within the file, duplicate objects, leftover splines, etc, and reorganizing and renaming the hundreds of objects into something that makes a modicum of logical sense. In the mean time, I'm going to post a few last WIP images from the past several days of finishing work. Just one for tonight, more tomorrow. And here's a little extra treat, a concept sketch for the interior of the EVA Control Room. This is a WIP image and has a ways to go yet.
Glad to hear the health is better. As for Polaris, stunning, simply stunning! Perhaps the best Sci-Fi ship to be designed since the refit E. IOW, a terrific balance between grace and function. (I know it is a WIP, but are those big cylinders out on the sails supposed to be visible? they look unfinished. more work to come? or control nodes for the animation maybe?)
What donation level do I need to make to get my own personal Vektor to take care of all my cgi needs?
Nah ... that's too much like slavery. I'd rather use one for brain grafts and do all the work myself.
Okay, now you guys are beginning to creep me out. Flattering, but creepy. As for the cylinders sticking out of the sails, they have been updated so they are no longer visible on the outside. I'll try to get some updated renders posted soon but I have a bigger problem to deal with at the moment. The inner surfaces of the sails got corrupted somehow and are a total loss. 3ds Max is somewhat notorious for doing that if you don't collapse the boolean modifier before saving the file and I should have known better. Fortunately, I was able to recover the component objects from a previous file iteration, but I have to redo the boolean operations and then clean them up with a pretty significant amount of poly editing. On a related note, Dennis, this may account for the OBJ export problems. I'll let you know.
Beautiful Vektor, just beautiful. Very glad to hear things are better healthwise too. Good news indeed.