Donny's Late TNG Era Interiors

[Donny]

FINAL RENDERS TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Enterprise-E Bridge (First Contact)

I've always wanted to do some interiors situated in the late TNG era, specifically of those of a Sovereign class, or U.S.S. Enterprise-E. I needed something different than TOS and TMP/TWOK to get me motivated after my rather long break, and due to some conversations with colleagues lately, I've decided to go ahead and strike while the motivation to do so was at a high.

I've started with getting together a modular corridor kit. I dunno if this project will ever move past the corridors, but I've always loved the Sovereign/Ent-E hallways and wanted to take a stab at them. Here's a little teaser on what's yet to come, a very WIP image of a rather decal-less corridor.

I went back and loaded up Elite Force 2 and thought I'd use their corridors for reference, but alas, they aren't accurate at all (in terms of exact angles. proportions, and shapes). And there is woefully little schematics out there for the TNG era films. Luckily, there is an overhead plan of the stretch of corridors outside of Engineering, so I was at least able to get the dimensions of a segment's footprint. For those wondering, the concentric corridors are 12 feet wide, 8 feet long, and 8 feet tall at their extremities. With this info, I was able to piece together the dimensions/angles/proportions through exhaustive study of screencaps.

And, of course, I'll be doing a version with the "Red Alert" lighting seen in "First Contact"

These renders are utilizing a new way to calculate lighting in Unreal called GPU Lightmass, and I’m letting the lighting be calculated in places by the emissive materials themselves rather than relying on light objects in the world. The combined methods yield a more physically accurate, softer result.

More to come soon!

 

[blssdwlf]

Whoa! That looks great!

 

[ashleytinger]

YASSSS

 

[Rekkert]

Ohh, these look beautiful! Cool to see you start working with GPU Lightmass, I recall we (and by we I mean the team members who knew what they were doing in Unreal) were starting to experiment with it back in the final months of Stage 9, such cool results.

Keep it up, I can't wait to see what you do in this thread!

 

[cardinal biggles]

I always loved the shape of those corridors. Nice to see you tackling this as a new project!

 

[Donny]

Finished up some polishing touches on this "primary" corridor segment, including refining the materials and including the 3 different decals we see in the Ent-E corridors (brushed-gold with dark brown lettering, dark brown with gold lettering, and red with white lettering). I also went ahead and strung a long run of corridors so they don't stop and stare into the blackness of space.





Will continue next week with the straight hallways, doors and doorways, wall plugs, junctions, and other "alternate" panels.

 

[publiusr]

This bridges TNG with newer Trekworks. Very good.

 

[Tomalak]

Nice! I was always a bit disappointed with Elite Force 2, because the corridors felt like these enormous beige halls that looked nothing like the sets that blew me away when saw First Contact aged 11.

Looking at it now, it's fun to spot how much of the bridge set is reused from the Enterprise-A bridge. And then the observation lounge and sickbay are straight reuses of existing sets. FC was a very smart, economic film that still looks great.

Looking forward to seeing where you go with this!

 

[Lt. Washburn]

Hey Donny, those look great! I've very interested in what you do with this. One thing that has always intrigued me is this quote from John Eaves:

“We… wound up designing a lot of ‘ends’, which are pieces that you can put at the back of a particular set, to create different areas of the ship. We could take a corridor and put a Jefferies tube end piece on it, or a hatchway. And we had a lot of corridor – two full quarter-circles of it, with a couple of T-intersections and walkways. You could walk for a good five minutes from the engine room set through Jefferies tubes without ever walking out of the set. There was also this big main door to engineering that Nancy Mickleberry had come up with. She put a second level of corridor above that, and you still had another story-and-a-half of warp core going up. The set was immense! Nancy and Herman worked together for a long time designing it (after all, it had to seem “Federation-style” and “Borgified”). The set had many neat areas, many of which never made it into the finished film.”

Now, of course the engineering set was multi-level, but he refers to a second-story "corridor" suggesting it was outside of Engineering. I've not been able to find a screencap from the movie or a set photograph that shows this area enough to prove one way or another what they did here.

I suspect that it was a second level right outside the big main door to engineering and that it might have had grating for floors. But that's just my speculation. I'd love to see you work out what they might have done here.

 

[Lt. Washburn]

Actually I just looked at my references again, and you can see a bit of the upper areas in the movie. Before they gain access to engineering, they start to draw attention to themselves and there are shots of Borg dropping from the upper level. Not a lot is shown, but it's there.

Also, I have some good reference for pieces of Borg panels that were put on the corridor walls, if you want them. And you may already know this, but the escape pod door panels were supposedly molded off a Camaro's cowled hood.

 

[Rekkert]

Hey Donny, those look great! I've very interested in what you do with this. One thing that has always intrigued me is this quote from John Eaves:

“We… wound up designing a lot of ‘ends’, which are pieces that you can put at the back of a particular set, to create different areas of the ship. We could take a corridor and put a Jefferies tube end piece on it, or a hatchway. And we had a lot of corridor – two full quarter-circles of it, with a couple of T-intersections and walkways. You could walk for a good five minutes from the engine room set through Jefferies tubes without ever walking out of the set. There was also this big main door to engineering that Nancy Mickleberry had come up with. She put a second level of corridor above that, and you still had another story-and-a-half of warp core going up. The set was immense! Nancy and Herman worked together for a long time designing it (after all, it had to seem “Federation-style” and “Borgified”). The set had many neat areas, many of which never made it into the finished film.”

Now, of course the engineering set was multi-level, but he refers to a second-story "corridor" suggesting it was outside of Engineering. I've not been able to find a screencap from the movie or a set photograph that shows this area enough to prove one way or another what they did here.

I suspect that it was a second level right outside the big main door to engineering and that it might have had grating for floors. But that's just my speculation. I'd love to see you work out what they might have done here.

The corridor connection right outside the main engineering door opens up into a T junction with two levels, and a small "balcony" connecting the two side walls, rather than a full corridor on the second floor. It's certainly unique, and a shame we never properly saw it its full glory.

Here's the corridor opening up, and a shot of the "balcony".

In FC it's barely noticeable when they first go to deck 16, with some Borg dropping from the second level on top of them. In Elite Force 2 the area is shown fairly accurately, though being a game from almost 20 years ago the fidelity isn't great. Here's a screencap I managed to get from a YouTube long-play.
EDIT: lol, just saw your second comment, sorry for repeating stuff.

 

[scragnog]

Fantastic stuff Donny!
And awesome to see you working with GPU Lightmass. It blows the standard UE4 lightmass out the water. I often wish we'd stuck with it on the Orville project as it looks so dang good.

 

[Donny]

Fantastic stuff Donny!
And awesome to see you working with GPU Lightmass. It blows the standard UE4 lightmass out the water. I often wish we'd stuck with it on the Orville project as it looks so dang good.

Dunno if you’re aware, but GPU Lightmass is included in Unreal 4.26. The only downside is that it requires ray-tracing to be enabled. And while messing with ray-tracing is fun (albeit framerate killing), I’ve noticed that whenever I have it enabled, the Unreal editor crashes constantly. It sucks, but the results I’m getting with GPU Lightmass are worth it, for now.

 

[Donny]

Hey Donny, those look great! I've very interested in what you do with this. One thing that has always intrigued me is this quote from John Eaves:

“We… wound up designing a lot of ‘ends’, which are pieces that you can put at the back of a particular set, to create different areas of the ship. We could take a corridor and put a Jefferies tube end piece on it, or a hatchway. And we had a lot of corridor – two full quarter-circles of it, with a couple of T-intersections and walkways. You could walk for a good five minutes from the engine room set through Jefferies tubes without ever walking out of the set. There was also this big main door to engineering that Nancy Mickleberry had come up with. She put a second level of corridor above that, and you still had another story-and-a-half of warp core going up. The set was immense! Nancy and Herman worked together for a long time designing it (after all, it had to seem “Federation-style” and “Borgified”). The set had many neat areas, many of which never made it into the finished film.”

Now, of course the engineering set was multi-level, but he refers to a second-story "corridor" suggesting it was outside of Engineering. I've not been able to find a screencap from the movie or a set photograph that shows this area enough to prove one way or another what they did here.

I suspect that it was a second level right outside the big main door to engineering and that it might have had grating for floors. But that's just my speculation. I'd love to see you work out what they might have done here.

Yes, I do have plans to tackle that two-story corridor outside engineering. There are schematics publicly available of the floor and ceiling plans of the engineering set and surrounding corridors, so I at least know the footprint. It’ll be tough piecing it all together though, since the corridor was so heavily borgified in the only scenes in said corridor, and all the shots were pretty tight. I’ll cross that bridge when I get there!

And @Rekkert, thanks for the EF2 shot! I actually loaded it up the other day and played that mission to this point to see how they handled it. Pretty good for the day and age it was crafted in, but I aim to be more accurate ;-)

 

[cardinal biggles]

Beyond the balcony, were there actual full-size corridor segments on that second level? I wonder if they used that for the bit where the security team is dropping through the emergency hatch in the floor to get down to the next deck?

 

[David cgc]

I always liked the E-E style. I was able to keep the color and general impressions of the -D, but hardened up a little so it didn't seem so institutional-cozy. I'm glad you're taking a whack at it, seeing these location studies in your style reminds me of IRML's old Captain's Yacht video, which is something I've always wanted to match at some point.

 

[Gibraltar]

Amazing work!

 

[Mytran]

What a fantastic idea for a new project! There's lots of details in those sets

For those wondering, the concentric corridors are 12 feet wide, 8 feet long, and 8 feet tall at their extremities.

I remember it took me a while to twig this when looking at the set plans. I just couldn't imagine that they would make such absurdly wide corridors! These days of course, that seems to be the new standard (on DSC)

However, don't forget FC also had the short stretch of rectangular corridor which looks narrower (I'm guessing the more standard 8 feet):
http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/firstcontacthd/firstcontacthd1850.jpg
http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/firstcontacthd/firstcontacthd0710.jpg

Then there was that time they redressed Voyager's standing sets with FC-style corridor arches - also 8 feet wide:
http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/insurrectionhd/insurrectionhd0176.jpg
http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/insurrectionhd/insurrectionhd0177.jpg

 

[captainkirk]

So are you going to try and make sense of the area where Riker fights the Viceroy?

 

[David cgc]

So are you going to try and make sense of the area where Riker fights the Viceroy?

The Viceroy boarded at the bottom of the ship, Riker and Worf were at the top. They met in the middle, deck 9, and the fight ended in an out-of-service turboshaft running parallel to the working one.