I took your advice, but ended up going in a slightly different direction. I've got the clear cover, then 20 or so thin coppery pipes/tubes just over that to simulate the ridges of the original model, then inside the warp nacelle I've modelled some very basic warp coils to break up the horizontal blandness. Then I've stuck a bunch of lights inbetween the gaps. The rest is just cheap and nasty post effects in Photoshop right now (the final would use HDR in After Effects) I'm not sure about the technical accuracy of this. I wasn't sure if it was the coils themselves that were supposed to glow, but in my renders the coils are the darker parts, and the lights inbetween are creating the light. If that's not correct, I could alternatively try giving some self illumination to the coils, and ditch the lights.
Oh how I wish you were making this in Lightwave. Of course, that assumes you'd actually be making it available at some point, which is overly presumptuous.
The warp grilles are two basic bits, a glass-like shell stepped in within the nacelle cutout, where the hot blue light spills through. On top of the glass are long square cross-section strips colored copper. When the warp drive is dark, you just see the copper strips. Hope that clarifies it. Rick
Thanks for clearing that up. It can be hard to tell details and materials like that from the model. Sometimes the difficulty is not in making something, but knowing what you're making. More progress renders soon. I'm currently working on the UVs and been adding the main hull windows and plating.
The basic look of the parts is very much like that of the Ent-D. Stylistically and colorwise, pretty much the same ship, just different shapes. Things didn't get much different until Prometheus. I'm not sure about the blue light being broken up into vertical sections, since the warp coils are split into top and bottom halves with gaps right where the grille is. In the 5' miniature, the neon was a run of horizontal tubing, and the light was pretty uniform fore-aft. However, I'm not one to say that experimentation is a bad thing. Have fun with it, folks. Rick
There's a seam between the panels, but it's not raised. Since I've done that with a bump map, it wasn't on the earlier renders. (ignore the crummy texturing, as it's only temporary)
I do intend to incorporate a bit of wear, but at the moment this is only the wear, without the underlying metal texture or specular, or individual metal sheets. I don't want it to look like BSG, but I do want it to look like it's spent some time in the DQ, and not fresh out of the shipyards.
I just confirmed that. I've been drawing the Intrepid for a while from the schematics...why would they show the seam so vividly?
It looks like this whole part (including the raised portion) could be removed to get to the electrical parts inside the nacelle. I think that seam works quite well a surface detail (shield-grid, whatever).
You're right. I have seen other pics of the model that show that section partially taken off, suggesting that it serves a secondary function of allowing the model builders to access the internal warp nacelle lighting.
^ This. One thing that always really bugged me about VOY, was how after all the pounding it took after 7 years without access to a starbase, it still looked showroom new in "Endgame". In all reality, by the end of the show's run, Janeway's Intrepid-Class ship sould have looked more like a Decrepit-Class ship, lol... kind of like how in the nuBSG miniseries, the Galactica looks pretty new on the outside, but by the end of the final season, boy howdy, she looks like she's been beaten half to death and drug through a minefield, lol.
Forgive me but I've always have viewed such complaints as pointless or self aggravating. With Star Trek Continuity is such bad shap to pick at the model seems petty by comparison. I always keep in mind if I want consistent damage on ships all times then send in the money because it takes gobs of it to produce new shots every single time something happens to the ship. Reusing stock video just saves money and keeps the show on the air and that's the only thing that really matters, right?
While that is true, they had (and missed) the opportunity to show us the Voyager with the scars of her adventures when they began using CGI more and more. It was simply unrealistic that she looked that good at the end of the series.
It was unrealistic that it was so pristine, but also probably unrealistic from a production pov to beat it up. I do plan to take this into account with my model of Voyager and try to apply a realistic amount of damage. Nothing distracting, just enough to say that it's been through a tough time.