I was actually having a hard time determining the color of a few of the running lights, notably those near the impulse drive. In many of the movie shots, the coloring of these lights is so washed out it’s difficult to tell. Is there some better reference I’m missing?
No, you've got better references than I do. It's one of those details that's easy to overlook so I always keep a look out for them.
Ah yes. I remember this shot from the Phase II episode "Nested Days Enterprise" or was is "All Our Nested Days."
**Heavy image warning!** (is that still even necessary anymore?) I sat down tonight and spent the past few hours taking screencaps of my final mid-resolution game-ready Refit Enterprise exterior model, under a variety of lighting schemes and backdrops. I debated on whether or not to upload all 25 images (maybe it's overkill?), but I figured you guys would appreciate seeing all of it. So here it is, for your viewing pleasure. Remember you can click on any image to go to my Flickr page where you can zoom in on the images to see them in high-resolution, and feel free to download the images from there if so inclined. The final model comes in at 113k triangles, or 55k polygons. Which isn't bad considering it's size. I did some research and most cars in Grand Theft Auto V were around 100k polygons, so I think I did good. The model uses quite a few 4K textures, so that's the main drain on system resources. Otherwise it's pretty clean and efficient, and everything runs at 120 frames a second on my machine. These first images are general shots of the Enterprise, many replicating angles we see in the films. The next post will contain up-close shots of the major structures of the ship. I should give credit to Makemake for the planet models, which I purchased via the UE4 Marketplace.
Here's up-close at the main structures of the ship: What's next? I want to take proper orthographic shots and do some flyby videos, and also take some shots of the Refit side-by-side with the pre-refit version. I'm technically supposed to be on break from working on this, so I may wait a week or so before doing those things. Stay tuned. This has been a really fun project and I'm glad I reignited my work on the Refit-era stuff. Hope you guys have been enjoying it too
Congrats on the perfect model and texture (I still can't belueve that polygon count!), and congrats on getting it finished as quickly as you did! I hope you're really happy with it
https://www.flickr.com/photos/61505200@N02/47685047251/ Takes my breath away. It's amazing to see how the various film crews had such different languages in filming this ship. I see some shots and I say "TMP!" Others "TUC!" "TWOK!" etc.
Really great job all around. I know this is a little unrealistic, but if you were to compare the visuals you're getting with your model and this game engine, how far back in time before it's as good or better than what was achieved with extended rendering times? Do you think it would beat the quality of the Enterprise series around 2005?
Those are great shots Donny! I had to take a break from mine, doing little things on the model was becoming a chore, so I did what one should always do in this cases, started to work on a few kitbashes :P Quick question, does the ship really have the red and green running lights? I just figured they were all white.
I'm not Donny, but I already went and checked the movie for this myself. Definitely red and green, just really washed out and hard to see unless you are looking for them.
I'm really impressed by how well it holds up even close-up. Thinking back to, like, Elite Force, I remember wishing for a movie-era version of that, but I never would've imagined it could come out like this. A little note on the hull markings. The starboard-side "Starship USS Enterprise - United Federation of Planets" legend on the saucer is only on the -A, the starboard side of the refit's saucer was blank. And the dashes framing "Enterprise" on the fantail below the shuttlebay only appeared in TMP, and in all the other movies the name was by itself. There's also the "Enterprise" next to the torpedo tubes that only appeared on the close-up model in TUC, but you don't have those, so never mind.
Here you can see that the port light is red, and the starboard is a faint green: It's actually easier to tell the color of the lights in this image: However, it looks like for the Ent-A, they switched the lights port to starboard. I'm finding it difficult to confirm the light colors for the topside pre-TVH, so it;s possible they were in this configuration on the Refit? Anyone out there know for sure what color the topside p/s running lights were? Elite Force was what started this obsession with building TOS and TMP-era walkthroughs of the ships many years ago! Thanks for pointing that out! I completely missed that the starboard side doesn't have the "Starship USS Enterprise - United Federation of Planets" legend on the saucer pre-Ent-A. TMP and TWOK don't show the starboard side of the ship much, which is why I missed it, but TSFS does and I just checked and you're correct! I'll make the corrections shortly. My model above is supposed to represent the "pristine" version of the ship as seen in TMP, so my fantail markings are consistent. However, I do want to make a variation of the textures with dulled-down Aztecing and slight weathering to represent it's appearance in TWOK sometime soon. I'll be sure to remove those dashes on the fantail then. Yeah, I debated on whether including it. Perhaps when I do my Ent-A version later on. Hmm, I'm not sure. I'll be honest...I've never gotten around to watching Enterprise (I know. Shame, shame). So I'd have to watch to see how the quality of my images compare to the VFX of the time.
Thanks for the in depth answer! Though, to me they screwed up on the A. If you go by aviation rules, green is starboard (right) and red is port (left).