My 3D model of Voyager (WIP)

That's the look I was going for. Your idea makes sense, but I have a feeling it might evoke a sense of speed and movement, which is not what I want

 

What about hull patches and carbon scoring....

There could be some "nostalgic" spots like the Dead lock hull breaches that took out the hull on Deck 3 just infront of the Mess and the side of the engineering hull.

Or the blast mark were the Species 8472 weapon hit the shuttle platform?

Or the Equinoxes torpedo hit to Voyagers Saucer.

You could all it the historically accurate Voyager and remake the scene of Voyager returning home.

 

That would be cool, although to be honest, I think I'm too lazy to go into that much detail. I'm pretty much sick of it at this point.

And since I'm building this primarily to recreate the intro video, I'm not sure if a beaten up ship would look suitably majestic for the job.

 

If you're using Mental Ray, the Architecture and Design Materials are wonderfully easy, yet extremely malleable. If possible, I'd the various levels of azteking in a composite shell material, and give each one a separate BDRF Custom Reflectivity Curve. After that, you could mess with the specific color of the reflection.

It's basically what I did for this project. The base of the Tower on the left is consists of glass with the same diffuse color and transparancy, but the reflectivity is altered on each one giving it a varied look.

 

Thanks for the tips. I always use MR Arch + Design materials. My current setup for the ship is just using a specular map to create different levels of reflectivity for the different parts. Do you think I'd be better off with only variations in the BDRF curve rather than just specular maps?


Anyway, I'm posting to give an update on my progress. A few days ago I decided I don't like the look of the textured on windows, so I'm basically rebuilding the main body from scratch to build it a different way. I had almost finished the entire ship, and while it would have been good enough, I'm really a lot more excited now about creating a great Voyager model. It's only the main body I'm rebuilding. The details such as transporter emitters, phaser strips, torpedo launchers etc were all separate anyway, so they're still good to go.
Before I was using a low poly mesh and smoothing it at render time, which made it difficult to add cut out details such as windows without messing up the shape when it smoothed. Now I've made the main mesh and smoothed it, then merged it down and am adding the details with regular poly modeling, and optimizing the mesh as I go. So far the results are a lot better. Not sure what the usual technique is for the pro ship builders here, but this is my first spaceship, so I'm adapting as I go.

I've now done all of the hull panel lines as geometry instead of textured, and corrected some errors in the shape of the nose of the ship. I've also been cutting out all of the windows and sensor arrays from scratch and they're a lot neater now. I'll also be re-texturing the ship to use larger, more subtle aztecing.

Here's the new mesh so far. Not much to look at yet.


Here are a few renders of the older model before I restarted it-

 

Your first mesh?! Looks dammed good man!
I can´t see something wrong with the old mesh. The new one surelly looks good too.

 

First Star Trek mesh, not my first mesh ever! I actually make 3D video for a living, so I have made a few meshes in my time.

For those of you that are still interested in how this is going, I've only just started retexturing the ship again after rebuilding the mesh. Here's a side by side comparison of my Voyager model and the CG model used on the show (taken from Doug Drexler's recent blog post). Mine is on the left, the original model is on the right.



The material is very basic so far. I'm going to make the aztecing much more subtle this time to look closer to the original, and I've yet to light the windows.

 

That certainly is a beautiful ship.

(less glare on the running lights though)

 

No disagreements there. I haven't touched any of the lighting since rebuilding the model, and seeing it side by side with the original, it's just too much.

Here are some freshly baked renders of the new windows. Every single window and room is now modeled, and not just drawn on. The lighting is a little bit blown out here, but you can still tell how much better it looks than the old drawn on ones.

 

Looks beautiful. Great job!

 

looks 99% like it was on the actual TV show

 

Here's a stupid modeling question... When you're modeling an object with lots of complex curves, such as Voyager, how do you ensure that a window of ship is "vertical" with respect to whomever might be standing behind it? I realize that the hull is "sloped," but the roughly rectangular window should still be oriented "upright" and not "skewed." How do you make that happen with shapes that have complex curves?

 

Not at all a stupid question. Some of those windows were really tough to keep level, but the general idea is that I cut them into the hull from the side view, so the angle of the surface doesn't matter, because i know I'm cutting it flat from the side view, and that projects onto the model. I hope that makes a bit of sense. I'm not great at explaining.

Here are some new higher res renders. The mesh is finished now, I just need to fix the main surface texture, then I'm ready to start animating.

 

Not sure if anyone cares about progress on this, but it's finally done!

 

This is incredibly good work.

 

I just started on my video, and thought this comparison was worth posting.
I haven't matched the angle or lighting, but I was surprised how how well it holds up against the original model. I'm not trying to match mine identically to the original though, so there are some clear differences, such as the window lighting and transporter emitters.

 

This looks really good.
And if it weren't for the overly white window, I'd say it looks better.

 

I've just fixed that up. They looked fine when I made them with generic lighting, but then I bumped up the exposure to match the original lighting, so they ended up overexposed and washed out white for this render.


edit:
Just adding another comparison pic, without any post effect glows to fix up the bussard scoop or deflector.

 

Seeing these two shots... is it possible that the nacelle-tips of your model are just a bit too blunt compared to the miniature?