It's supposed to be Odiosis which is latin for boring. This ship is going to be used in background shots. The D on the font bugs me as well, I'll modify it when I have time next. I used a federation font face that I found somewhere long ago, the D is rather round.
Hey Guys, its been a while since I last posted, this is going to be some what of a update of what all I've been working on for the month of January. A lot of the month I spent getting my RTX 3080 egpu setup, and tweaking my render settings in blender 2.91 using optix. From there I spent a week doing some test animations, and from there started working on Character animations (using motion capture from mixamo, along with recording facial mocap via facecap for iOS, and then eventually body mocap using the Blender Motion Capture BMC) I also worked on some 2d LCARS using blender for the Nova class bridge that I built a few years ago. When I first built this bridge I used LCARS from various sources online, but with me now wanting to post my own work online I have been going back and updating the LCARS to ones that I have made myself. Each LCARS screen was made in blender using guidance this tutorial posted by LDS-Jedi. So far I have created 12 different screens Each screen has a Looping animation on it, however tried to keep things as simple as possible so some screens just have some blinking text, others have a few different images that repeat like slideshows. I still have a few more that I want to do that I will be adding to the set over time. I also need to remake the MSD with one created by myself, luckily the MSD from the Rhode Island was recently sold at auction. One of the challenges that I faced with this bridge was finding the right colors for the set. If I went with the greys of the Equinox set, then the bridge was too dark, Voyager colors came out too blue, I settled on a color scheme that was a blend of the Equinox, Prometheus, and Dauntless colors. When creating the LCARS I settled on shades of 3 yellows and 3 blues. When I tried to straight up stay to sampling color patterns of a specific era I found it difficult to find a good flow. One of the last projects that I showcased on this thread was my Miranda Class ship. Have not done much more on it as it has the level of detail I was originally planning on putting into it. This past weekend I modeled a Drydock to go into my Utopia Planitia scene that I am working on. The drydock was created with some basic geometry, for the greeble patterns on the upper part of the dry dock I first used a subdivision surface modifier set to simple, then applied a displacement modifier using a texture created from a Voronoi texture with a Manhattan distance metric. I then used an array modifier along with a mirror modifier to repeat the mesh to match the length of the drydock. Not 100% screen accurate since the drydock filming model for generations but meets the needs for what I am looking to do. In the image below you will see the Miranda Class from a month ago, plus my freedom class. Notice that there are two different drydock structures. One is similar in style to what we see in Star Trek Generations, this is the one that I modeled this weekend. In the background you will see another drydock, which is one that I modeled 6 months ago, was trying to go with a basic drydock that mixed the styles of the ENT TMP NEM era drydocks. Additionally you will see the Utopia Planitia type Starbase, this is another quick and dirty 2 day build I did a few months back Originally in this scene My Nova Class ship was to be where the Miranda class is, however whenever I tried to render it using Optix, blender would either crash, or hang. I think it maybe something in the materials, this will be something that I will be looking into one of these days soon.
Beautiful bridge! The colors are perfect, as is the design; though I'd add two chairs to the helm, as the Equinox had. I feel the lighting might be a bit too bright, the details on the central ceiling piece and the LCARS on the helm get lost. I usually set my lights at .75 tops to avoid that. Also, hang on, you did the LCARS in Blender?! How? The tutorial's very cool, I use mostly the same techniques myself on Inkscape. That Utopia Planitia scene is looking great as well, weird about the Optix crash, will be amazing once you're able to get the Nova in as well.
Thanks!!! The chairs are actually there however I had moved them to the render layers that currently have the characters sitting at those stations when I rendered the images. As far as the LCARS, when I tried making them in illustrator or photoshop I found it difficult to align things quite right because the app kept trying to snap things to where I did not want them snapped and it was just frustrating. What I did was model the buttons and swepts, then started filling things in from there. The camera I used was set to orthographic with a really shallow start / end. To make things easier to animate, most of the animations are basic color changes, so I duplicated what I wanted to change, adjusted the materials, then animated the z axis location (camera facing down) and set the keyframe interpolation to linear in the graph editor. I think I found the issue with my nova model, I need to remove a bunch of extra materials and things that are there but not actually in use.
Wow, that bridge is awesome! I love the Voyager-esque layout. This shot in particular looks spectacular and had me completely fooled as being a photo when I first saw it. That's interesting, because the lighting here looks totally fine and natural to my eye, whereas I always think your renderings – while super awesome by every measure imaginable and generally some of my favorite things to see on here – always look a tad too dark to me. Maybe there's something wrong with your monitor settings? Sounds like you've got “Snap to grid”, “Snap to pixel” or “Snap to point” activated in Illustrator. If you deactivate them (under “View”) you should be good. The option “Smart guides” however is pretty helpful in those situations.
@batboy853: Well, it's certainly an unorthodox way to do the LCARS, but it clearly works great! I would imagine it'll make making the animations easier. @Michael: That could very well be a possibility, I'm stuck with an 11 years old Samsung SyncMaster ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@Michael Thanks for the tip I will try that next time I am using illustrator! @Rekkert I always love looking at peoples renders on different screens just to see how they come out. I always check on my phone and macbook in addition to the monitors that I use normally. Today I did a one day build Workbee and cargo pod, for in the background of my drydock scene. Some of the detail on the workbee pod was a height map I texture painted in blender to save time. That map also drives the color changes on the hull using a Mix RGB node in blender. The cargo pod is a very simple mesh using my handy rib texture I've used oh so many times. The cargo pod I created in an hour...Thats all I can really say about it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thanks!!!! As I mentioned before my long term goal is to do a short animation filled with character animation, dialog of a crew leaving drydock. Last night I did a test animation of my scene and I sort of came to the realization that I am going to need more than 2 classes of ships + my hero ship. The shipyard looked odd with every dock being filled with Freedom class and miranda class ships over and over again, the scene needs more variation. Looking over all of the official ships we have seen over the years I figured the easiest ship to model quick would be the Oberth class ship. This was an 8 hour build, only going into as much detail as I would need to model for another background ship. One thing that helped was that I was able to reuse some of the materials from my Miranda class ship. Because I do not plan on doing any close-ups of this ship I did not give it a registry or a name. I may go back to this at a future date if the need arises. Another thing to note, I need to adjust the lighting as it seems to be too intense, which is why certain areas of the ship look straight up white.... There is color there, but did not want to fix it for these renders cause it's getting late.
Thanks everyone! I was taking a look at some of my shaders today, if you look closely on some of the renders I posted last night you will see a tiny 2 showing up on the dark grey / back area of the lower hull. I reused the shuttle door material from the Miranda class for this since it had my handy ribbed material, and I forgot to remove the nodes for the numbers. I also corrected a few textures that were set to clip instead of repeat.
Loving that Oberth model! That is definitely a class that doesn't get enough attention. Looks great for a ship to just be in a background.
Another few weeks have passed since I have last posted an update, but I have still been very much hard at work. Its been a frustrating few weeks for me with the snowstorm that hit the US, I live in Chicago. While things did not get as bad as elsewhere in the US, I did have some frustrations in the sense that 3 snowstorms in a 14 day period dumped over a foot of snow each time. My car was literally buried under a mound of snow, and most of the streets and alleys were not plowed. Luckily the snow has started melting After the Oberth, I switched into animation mode, and during the past few weeks, have animated 1670 frames (roughly 70 seconds), as well as rendered them, then found things that I've needed to fix, then rendered again, then found more things to fix, then rendered some more! Here are some stills so far, some might already look familiar: I've updated a few materials here and there for the ship exterior scene, most notably the materials on the Utopia planitia stations using the textures and materials created for my Miranda class ship The characters were made last summer using Adobe Fuse. I had to push on getting as many characters done and animation ready before Adobe killed the app last fall. I have 23 characters made from Fuse, they were then brought into Adobe Mixamo, then imported into blender. From there I downloaded Mocap from Maximo and transferred the animations onto the characters along with some custom animations. For facial animation I am using Facecap for the iphone, then using Animation nodes to transfer the Facecap data to the Mixamo shapekeys. Hair, was something I spent a few days on per character. The hair was made in blender using blender's particle hair systems. I like the hair one some of my characters more than others..... The uniforms were modeled based off of the Mixamo default characters, then used textures for certain things such as the lines on the shoulders, zippers... I have tried using blenders cloth modeling tools but I have found it difficult to get a shirt to look like a shirt so.... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Also found that the sim was super slow on my laptop. I was also considering looking into learning Marvelous Designer, but apparently you have to be rich to afford it, and I do not believe in subscription based applications for something I am doing for fun (for now) Then 2 weeks ago the Unreal Metahuman creator announcement came out, and now I am sorta continuing on with these characters, even though once Metahuman creator comes out I will be ditching them. The next scene in my animation is in engineering. Currently setting it up now. This week I have updated some of the materials on the lights on the warp core, previously I was using an animated texture that when I ran an animation test, the order of the blinking lights was just not that great. I have since updated them using a color ramp material where I animate the UV mapping of the material. I also created some LCARS for the consoles in Engineering, based loosely off of how the console is seen in Voyager's science lab. Again created the LCARS in blender, then rendered using an Orthographic camera, then used as textures, including one that drives the aluminum look. Each of the individual screens that would have been a monitor on the show, are animated, I the models and materials setup to make them swappable. I'm considering adding something to the middle of the room, either a console or dare I say it... a pool table. Reason why is that it will make animating the room with characters easier similar to how the pool table was used in TNG to keep the characters in the one section of the hallway for filming, or how in DS9 Obrien is always standing in 1 of 3 places in the Defiant's engineering...