I based my width of 2 cm for the doors from this scene, clearly showing a gap of about 2.5 cm/1 inch for the door pocket. It's easier for me to line things up in Unreal if I make it an even number (working on grid is important) so I just rounded down to 2 cm. Sure, I could've made it thinner and done whatever I wanted, but I honestly like the doors having a little thickness to them. Any thinner and to me they'd feel less realistic, I suppose. I know I'm all over the place on where I sacrifice realism and where I don't. I guess it all comes down to personal preference. Almost every step I take with this project is a decision of some sort, and sometimes earlier decisions influence later ones. For instance, if I were to make my doors thinner, I'd have to go through and update all the doorways I've already built, and re-construct the turbocar exterior to be a slightly smaller radius to match (which would mean not only re-scaling the geo but also re-baking my textures as well, since I bake custom textures for almost all of my geometry). Not a huge task but a task nonetheless that would take a complete "work session" to complete. So it comes down to deciding whether I'd want to take that task on or just live with my turboshafts being a few cm thicker. The turboshafts have to be larger than their on-screen appearance anyway to fit an accurately scaled turbocar inside, so a few centimeters really isn't all that much to worry about.
There was one lift with double doors in TSFS and another in TVH's hospital scene. Those don't really count though.
<looks around room> Now we've got their attention. Just what did I send Donny? Don'cha all wish you knew.
I remember reading somewhere... God, I wish I could remember where. Possibly the round-table discussion that came in that booklet with Rick Sternbach's Enterprise-D blueprints? Anyway, someone is talking about refurbishing the movie sets for TNG in 1987 and mentioned that the doors on the movie sets were only 1/4" thick and had trouble staying on their tracks, so even though it looked less futuristic, all the TNG doors were made 1" thick. But looking at that transporter room door, I'm not sure I believe it now.
I'm surprised that Unreal works in metric rather than imperial measurements! I imagine that the psychological impact of the thickness is far more important than their structural impact for most of the interior elements... Given the amount of work and sheer incredible attention to detail you're putting in, I think a degree of "all over the placeness" is well earnt, and probably prtty much inevitable! How much was this a decision you'd made before starting this section? You said something a few posts ago that hinted you may have had this discussion in mind when you first started modelling your first elements. I'd be fascinated to see your "preproduction" notes - please gods tell me you haven't got a full cartoon set somewhere lol I'll hazard a guess it's not the typical unsolicited internet pictures lmao dJE
The door thickness is also readily apparent in this shot (link). (I just noticed you can see part of a member of the film crew reflected in the glass to screen left!)
When it was initially released, it was metric only. I believe now there are options for Imperial as well. But, honestly, I feel much more comfortable working in metric at this point, even though most Trek sets were built adhering to Imperial units rather than metric. Well, I didn't realize there'd be a difference in the required width of the turboshaft and the actual turboshaft set piece until yesterday morning, but months ago when I built the turbo-car I looked ahead to the cargo bay/rec deck turboshafts and realized what deviations I'd have to make in order to make the turbolifts actually work (inner/outer doors, curved inner doors moving in an arc, etc). Had I not thought ahead, I'd be cursing myself re-modeling my turbolifts right now I'm sad to report that I don't really do much doodling these days. I make exhaustive lists of tasks to complete per given area, which helps me stay on track and focused. But all my "doodling" is usually done in 3D these days. It's much easier to figure out dimensions, spacing, etc in a 3D environment rather than a 2D piece of paper. More door pocket width: (This is, of course, the same doorway McCoy is using when exiting the transporter room in my previously posted image There's this shot from TSFS which shows that this partially destroyed door is pretty damn thin. Thinner than the pocket, as a matter of fact. But I chose to have my doors be air-tight with the pockets, so that I don't have to worry about building the actual geometry within the pockets.
The doors are wafer thin, as per this frame a few frames before the other one I posted of the Sickbay (link). The thick red is not the door, it's the doorframe. The whole doorframe is apparent in this shot (link). But I think this, along with the image of Kirk and the redshirts at Spock's door, pretty conclusively demonstrates the doors are like foamcore board-thin and it's the frame that's over an inch thick.
The thickness of the shaft may depend on what how you think the lifts operate. If the shafts are mainly there to keep things out of the way, with the cars being self-propelled and self-guided, similar to various hover carts and vehicles, you can probably get away with pretty thin walls. If their motive force requires interacting with the walls in some way, then there's got to be room for whatever it pushes against. There's probably examples of it working either way in canon.
Actually, I just walked through several screenshots and I can see the reflection is of Bones through the doorway.
Since the cargo containers and their alcoves are the most important part of the cargo bay, I focused on getting them modeled and detailed first. I also created a handful of cargo manifest decals, some out of Lee Cole's sticker book and many others I made up using the various department logos or symbols I created myself. The individual alcoves are programmed in a way so that I can just plop down an alcove and click a few toggle boxes to set which decals are applied and if any pods are missing. And yes, I've even got it programmed to make the hold indicator icon be correct for which pod the decal is applied to This way, I don't have to worry about hand-placing a hundred decals and pods when I do the final arrangement of the cargo bay. I imagine the pods are stored in the alcove magnetically, explaining how one could be missing from the bottom of the quad without the one above it falling. I mean, this makes most sense. Otherwise, to remove a bottom pod, a cargo handler would have to take the one above it out as well. Wouldn't be very efficient this way. The free-standing pods can also be displayed as open. Later, I'll create an assortment of cargo containers to go within these larger pods.