Did some tinerking on the old girl while I should have been doing other things. Story of my life. I was thinking, originally, of greebling the hell out of the gap between the two halve of the nacelles, or putting some kind of ridge in there, bit decided against it. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with her, or when. I've decided it's past time I took this hobby to the next level, and I'm thinking I want to do that development on my Bradbury model, as opposed to this one. I did give her a name, USS Renaissance NCC-2029. Old, yet still good? I haven't really looked at this since the DTNE contest, or a bit after. I pretty much switched to building out the Renown, and then did almost nothing for a few years, as is my creative wont. Bad habits. I decided to try out my new shader style on her. I think she looks okay, but man, I really wasn't very good back then.
The other things I was supposed to be working on. Well, some of them, anyway. It's impossible to do a picture of the rest of it. This is a style change from the previous sample I posted of my materials work. This version is much less sensitive to lighting, and does a pretty decent job with hard surfaces in the background. Not quite perfect toon style, but definitely good enough. At least that's what I tell myself to convince me that I've more important things to do than tinker with it more. This also does a much better job with fingers, which were a bit of an issue.
I've finally taken a little time to work on stuff. I settled on rebuilding the Renown over rebuilding the Bradbury. I decided I wanted to work on this more than I did the other. I plan to do a complete rebuild and re-think of Renown. I've been toying with an idea for years now, and I've decided to step it up to actively working on, if not quite so far as "taking seriously." I've wanted to re-imagine Star Trek for the modern world for a long time. Not reboot, and not pretty up for a modern audience, but render it down to its core ideas and ideals, then reconstruct it based on what we are and know now. A lot of my favorite sci-fi suffers the problem of having outlived its own timeline. SDF-1 in the South Pacific, off Japan, 16 years ago. The Zentradi destroyed Earth as we know it 6 years ago. We sent a manned probe to Jupiter around the same time as SDF-1 arrived and sent a second mission to figure out what happened to the first 5 years ago. Somewhere, the Eugenics wars should be starting. Stuff like that. Moreover, the science behind Star Trek pretty much has moved to "yeah, that couldn't begin to work like that." The transporter, for example I couldn't really claim I'm doing this because the result would be better. I'm only doing it because I can. I started off taking cues from the TOS/TMP Enterprise. Then I spent a while thinking about who's done the best rethink of the concept of a Federation starship. The obvious answer is Vector. All of this represents first blush noodling with shapes. I haven't started working on the secondary hull, at all. I just put in the old one for perspective. I decided to drop the speed wedge primary hull and go back to saucers. Because it just feels more Star Trek. I'm fine with elliptical saucers, probably from my childhood adventures building starships out of spoons. There's a logic here. Boats. They all look alike. Okay, not exactly, but they tend to share a broadly common shape. The reason for this is that they are shaped by the environment they operate in. I've decided that warp drive dictates certain shapes. This means the Klingon ethos is going to have trend more Bird of Prey than D-7, but I think it can work. I'd done a whole mock up for this side of the primary hull, but it looked like ass. Re-thinking. My ideas about how warp drive works (Alcuberrie metrics) suggest a nave deflector up here. I never liked the solution from Enterprise, and I'm struggling to come up with a solution better than (or different from) Vector's. I'll probably give up and just accept that some ideas can't be improved on. Some of us get to be Vector. I'm not part of that group. The first major divergence from Star Trek design ethos I'm definitely going with. The Bridge is in the center of the saucer, no on top. There will be something up there. A science instrument or observation deck, but the bridge is moving to where it should be. Not even for tactical reasons. She's not a warship, by any means. Basically, she's stuffed with advanced environmental protection technologies, but the ship is designed to gracefully fail. Keeping her most important functions (Operations, Sickbay) as deep inside the hull as possible allows the superstructure to act as passive protection against space hazards when active measures fail. Non-clay. Just a couple of shots for a sense of color. Ask me about the transporter...
Part of what I was doing all this time was figuring out how to do a double smooth in Blender. I determined that you can't. I has a sads. The double smooth is basically laying 2 subd modifiers on the mesh. The first one is set up so ignores certain edges. They don't get divided. The second subds the whole mesh. It allows you to do harder edges without using the sharp edge (which often looks a bit off) or control loops method. The final mesh has less geometry, too. It depends on being able to exclude edges from subd, and blender doesn't do that. The best solution I could come up with is to use the first step of the double smooth concept (marking edges to exclude, in this case, creating vertex groups) but then use those edges as bevels. While it does add geometry in the final mesh, it means there're no control loops to worry about. The additional geometry doesn't appear in edit mode until you apply modifiers to freeze the mesh. The saucer has 3 separate bevel groups feeding 3 separate bevel modifiers. Two are exactly the same modifier but applied to different groups, since the groups are right next to each other, which would cause the individual faces to bevel if they were in the same group. It's a bit convoluted to set up, but it's made the actual editing of the mesh much simpler, and should help keep the final poly count down.
Image dump. The only bit of the 1.0 Renown likely to survive this rebuild in essentially the same shape is the rollbar/neck combo. Here we have some 1701-A Based mock ups that also won't make the final cut. Quick and dirty stuff for figuring out the proportions. I expected I'd need to tinker, a lot, to figure out the placement but this speaks to me. Now I just have to figure out the pylons (I must build additional). The final nacelle shape is probably going to much closer to the original than this. I have a sense of what I want to do with the secondary hull, but only a kind of vague one. It's something like my usual style meets USS Vengeance. Not too like the big black ship, but there's a lot of influence coming from there as it is. If you can't see that, it's because I'm not even trying to replicate it. I'm taking shapes I like and modifying them to fit here. I'd do the same in terms of the secondary hull, so it likely wouldn't look anything like the Vengeance. As I mentioned before, Deck 1 is not the bridge. The primary shuttlebay will be up there, but right now, I'm not sure how big she is. While Renown 1.0 is FRIGGIN' 'UGE, I'm intentionally moving away from the Star Trek size inflation schtick. I have no issue with Nu-Trek's Venti Vanilla Latte-prise being as big as she is, but I prefer to approach size from the perspective of "what is this ship for." As the visual team from TNG noted when they started doing scale drawings of the Big D, she's WAY too bigg for a mere 1040 people. After I get a general sense for base shapes, I mean to mock up some engineering hardware and internal support equipment (not too detailed or too much) to get an actual sense of how big I mean the internals to be. Then scale the ship to that. I am taking a page from JJ. The Warp drive is not going to be something that would fit comfortably in a moving truck or two. This thing bends spacetime into an Alcubierre metric. JJ's core makes sense, for a device that creates and effective mass/energy of a jovian planet. (I've plenty of handwavium on hand to suggest why the ship doesn't actually use that much power, but it still makes sense to look at the core as somewhat bigger than it's depicted in the prime universe.) That's going to mean the neck and pylons don't have a fixed scale, because I'm going to use the primary hull as the key reference. The thinner bits will have to rescale to fit the internal equipment. The purpose of a Starship in my reinvented Trek is to serve as a kind of research university in space. Their secondary purpose is diplomacy, and somewhere at the bottom of the list is defense.
Pic Dump I think I've settled on the (very) general shape for all the parts, their scales and relationships. Now it's time to start building the real things, rather than the placeholders.