Now for the TWOK version of the Enterprise transporter room. We see very little of the set in TWOK, but what we do see shows that a number of things about this set were changed. First off, the very-TOS purple lighting was abandoned for a neutral lighting setup. A lot of the walls were painted with a darker trim color to add some contrast to otherwise monotone scheme. I've gone a bit further with this and darkened up some other areas of the room as well, such as the floor greebles underneath the grating. The wall to the right of the chamber was opened up to allow access to the "service corridor" that ran behind the sickbay set on the stage. We see Kirk, Spock, and Saavik using this service corridor to exit the room when they return to the ship from the Gensis Cave. In addition to these changes, several props were added to the room and adjoining service corridor, such as a large board of blinking lights, control panels, caution and warning decals, and the ubiquitous Nicholas Meyer fire extinguishers. Obviously, Meyer felt the room was too sterile and the set designers added much more visual interest to the set, even though we see it very briefly and from very narrow camera angles. I took the liberty of "greebling up" some of the off-camera areas as well in order to match. (Note the greebles I added to the right of the above shot) (I don't particularly like that blinking board of lights added to the wall to the left of the transporter, but it's canon!) (The additional blinky-light board to the left and the greeble pipe setup to the right were additions made by me that are completely conjecture) I love these to control panels above. Probably my favorite of the rented props used to dress the Enterprise sets in TWOK. Fun fact: this control panel appears briefly in "The Last Starfighter", as well as do other props that were rented for this film. This door is at the end of the service corridor, but I have yet to model anything on the other side of it. (Eventually, I'd like to model a room for storing equipment essential to away teams and space-suits. I'd then also connect this room to the corridor) Again, the ceiling is pure conjecture. And here are two shots of the room in Red Alert mode: If you'd like to compare to my earlier verisons, check out the following links: First attempt in Unreal 4 Attempt in Unreal 3 That Unreal 3 attempt is godawful, but the first attempt in Unreal 4 wasn't terrible, but I was using the first Blu-Ray release of TWOK as reference, and that print is color-graded too blue and it shows in my renders. (Note the previous DVD release was color-graded too red). As an FYI, I'm now using the proper color grading of the Director's Cut Blu-Ray as primary reference for all TWOK stuff. And that does it for now! This isn't my favorite set, but it contained a lot of elements that will be used in other sets (the tileable greeble wall, service corridor, and all of the TWOK-specific control panels) which is why I chose to do it now. I don't know if I'm going to continue the other transporter rooms seen in the first three films just yet (Orbital Office, Regula One, and Old City Station), of if I'm going to do perhaps proper Reliant/Grissom versions yet either. I'm going to take the next couple of days to decide what I want to do next.
So apart from the cosmetic changes you made, were there any things you discovered about the transporter room that you didn't know when you did your previous version in Unreal 4?
Come to think of it, no. But I didn’t really expect to. I basically just wanted to give the set a facelift and a proper TMP variant, and use it as an excuse to knock out all those assets which will be used throughout the other sets.
Maybe I am misremembering, but it concerned the overhead monitors in the transporter and I pointed out that some editions of the Flight Manual included some notes that specified which panels were to be reused in the transporter. I'll have to look on my desktop for the information.
You do a Reliant one...perhaps you should include the Genesis Device! Maybe even Khan's son (as seen here https://observationdeck.kinja.com/holy-crap-khan-had-a-baby-son-1728117002). I would prefer a variant (not a request) that has the upper "patio blocks" removed showing the fresnel lenses a la the way the transporter was in that 1986 Trek "Good Morning America" special (which would have been the Enterprise-A's room if not for TNG).
Y'know... I never knew there was any existence of a son born to Khan until today...37 years after I saw the movie for the first time in theaters. To have a toddler meandering about the Reliant, only to have him get blown up when Genesis explodes is...well...let's just say I'm glad they cut that whole subplot.
I agree, I'm glad it was axed. Although one could say that Khan was so bent on revenge that he'd let his son go bye-bye. I actually knew about this earlier. Back to the transporter topic: I still think they should have done a bit more to differentiate the Enterprise-A transporter room from the Enterprise-D one, though after seeing that intro to "The Cage" that Roddenberry did, the upper part of the transporter chamber was DEFINITELY the same when one sees the "patio blocks" removed. If I were Herman Zimmerman, I would probably have changed the back pattern to TMP/TWOK/TSFS honeycomb for TFF and TUC to disguise it better.
Superb work as always, Donny! Might wanna fix that slight typo on the Receive portion of that panel, though.
Zimmerman was very limited as to what he could change, especially on TFF, which was filming between October and December 1988, when TNG was filming its second season. They do very little in the way of cosmetic changes -- you can see the Enterprise turbolift graphic in this corridor shot, but you still have the TNG orange doors and red labels totally unaltered; in the Scotty/Uhura sickbay scene, they didn't even bother to switch out the LCARS graphics. The transporter room is probably the most altered of the TNG sets, with the booth and the blue "pole" lights along the back of the transporter chamber.
Man, I'm really glad that Meyer made the additions and changes he did. The TMP transporter room is so dark and sterile, it's downright creepy. It's almost totally unlike the version we saw on TOS, and it's one of the few TMP sets I don't really like the design of. Honestly, the Enterprise sets in Meyer's films look a lot more inviting and lived-in in general. I could see myself serving aboard ships like those. I'd be going stir crazy on the sterile TMP Enterprise inside of a month. Away teams? What are those? Do you mean landing parties?
In-universe, I've always liked to think the color palette we see in TWOK are how they were supposed to look if the ship hadn't have been forced out of drydock early to deal with the V'ger crisis. The ship went out with the 23rd century equivalent of bare drywall still left to be painted or tile floors still left to be laid.
Yeah, I believe something similar. The TMP sets are the bare bones, the TWOK versions are the finished product. Supposedly, the refit backstory and the Enterprise being sent out before she was ready was a cover story in case the sets weren't completely done in time for the Phase II pilot to start shooting.
Ahhh dammit! I'm always paranoid of typos getting past me. Thanks for pointing it out! Ahh double dammit! You know, working in other eras of Trek all day at work really gets me saying things like "shuttlebay" and "away team" when referring to my TOS era projects when I should damn well know better
It's a shame they weren't allowed to repaint/relight a section of corridor, just to make it feel a bit less NextGen-y:
Guess they were in the middle of changing out the carpets... there's a roll leaning against one of the stanchions. Anywho... like the coloring you gave the hallways here. Feels more like something between the earlier films and TUC.
I wonder if that wouldn't have been possible just with the color grading available to filmmakers at the time. Cool idea.
Never spotted it either. They did a better job disguising the corridors in TUC, with era-appropriate signage and such. I do wonder if the TUC Ent-A sickbay was dark so that people wouldn't easily recongize it as the Enterprise-D's.