A 3D mesh of the 1701-D from...1988?

[137th Gebirg]

Very cool. I teach IT for a living, now, after 32 years in the industry. Pics like this remind me of how lost my students are in Linux or Cisco courses. They've grown up with GUIs. The manual effort necessary to produce these drawings would be beyond what my students are generally capable of.

Dakota Smith

Well, as I recall, it wasn't an easy model to build. The neck was the real bitch. I actually designed it to separate, but never finished the top of the "head" or the cutout on the bottom of the saucer.

Here's an animation of the model going to warp. The speed is rather messed up though! I remember being proud of figuring out how to actually stretch the model in a way that wasn't possible using photography. The tricky bit was making the back end move at one speed as the front end stretched away, and then have the tail end "snap" after the faster moving front.

I think the most detailed model I built was the Excelsior, which was built from plans used by Ed Mireki and Tom Hudson to built a small model, one of which was supposedly used on the Klingon targeting displays in TUC. I'm still hoping to find my mesh of that model zipped up somewhere.

That's the one I remember! Damn - brings back some good memories there... Awesome job on that

 

[Psion]

Wow, what a stroll down memory lane. TurboSilver! Sculpt 3D! Imagine! I can't seem to find the 1701 model I made with Sculpt 3D with my Amiga 1000 back in 1987 or '88. It wasn't nearly as nice as Maurice's 1701-D, though -- that shape confounded me for years.

Here's the model I made of Regula 1 with Imagine shortly after its release:

Neat.

Back then, how long did it take to "render" one of these meshes?

As I recall, I left my A2000 with a 68030 processor running overnight to render the above.

 

[Max Nex]

"I think the most detailed model I built was the Excelsior, which was built from plans used by Ed Miareki and Tom Hudson to built a small model, one of which was supposedly used on the Klingon targeting displays in TUC. I'm still hoping to find my mesh of that model zipped up somewhere. "

I would like to see this one ,please Maurice.
(I recognize your name from The Best of Trek #13)

 

[Santaman]

I have two Atari ST machines in my scrap heap, they're wonderful machines, great renders, for that time those were quite amazing.
Makes me think of the art from the demo scene which was beyond awesome in those days, I've seen stuff run on old machines that boggles the mind..

Bit off topic but a show case of what one could do with some knowledge of assembly...
This demo ran on a 25Mhz machine without any 3D capability, music and graphics fit in a 2Mb zip file...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtCW-axRJV8
Future crew's Second Reality from 1993
http://scene.org/file.php?id=91322 <-- original file.

*edit* One for Forbin, an Amiga demo.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTZtbBWbGw4&feature=related

 

[ALF]

I positively love the low-res graphics where you can actually see the pixels... so classic!

 

[sojourner]

Those were Hi-res. Back when the best display you could get was 640x480. Ah the memories.

Think I'll go tweek some config.sys files.

 

[Kaiser]

Awesome Renders Forbin and Psion

 

[blssdwlf]

Good stuff Forbin, Maurice and Psion. I had played with Sculp Animate on a buddy's Amiga 500. The rendering time was very long back then I still have an Amiga Toaster but it hasn't been fired up in years... ahh Good times

 

[captainkirk]

I believe there was a CG version of the ship used in Masks, but this would be older and I think it's more detailed. And it looks better than a model I made of it about seven years ago.

There isn't a CG Enterprise in Masks. If I'm not mistaken, the picture you're thinking of is a wireframe for the CG comet/library, and there is an extremely simplistic Enterprise wireframe in the shot...but it is just for placement reference for the model photography.

Yeah, that was what I was thinking of. I just couldn't remember if it was a stand in or was used in the final shot.

 

[Forbin]

Those were Hi-res. Back when the best display you could get was 640x480. Ah the memories.

Think I'll go tweek some config.sys files.

The Amiga 2000 rendered at TV res, which was something like 768 by (I forget). BUT, it only rendered in 16 colors with dithering at the res.

I remember being amazed at the quantum leap in rendering time when I got my 25MHz processor board. A plain chrome sphere on a checkerboard plane went from taking over an hour to about 5-10 minutes. But animations were still an overnight deal.

 

[Maurice]

Cool stuff, guys. I'm still trying to find my other models. I have low-res renders of my Excelsior model, but those fail to show all the detail I put into it.

 

[BlobVanDam]

I love seeing this kind of thing. Great work from everyone here. Older 3D graphics is an interest of mine, because I'm always so impressed what people were able to achieve with the tools and computer power of the time, when you have people these days thinking they can just meshsmooth blob their way to success, and abusing the modeling tools.

The oldest Trek mesh I have is a model of the Defiant I made in about 2001 in 3D Canvas, and it's got nothing on the models in this thread!

 

[Maurice]

The guy who wrote CAD 3-D on the ST and worked on Autodesk 3D Studio which became Max messaged me and said he has code to convert the model for Max, so I sent it to him and soon we may be seeing that mesh rendered with 2011 tech!

 

[Forbin]

I'm pissed - I thought I converted my Excelsior mesh to a PC-usable one thru Caligari & TrueSpace. Can't find it now!

 

[Max Nex]

Forbin,
I hope you find it someday as I would like to see it.

it is amazing to what you guys were doing way back then...I can't even do that now.

 

[Forbin]

I've forgotten how! When we got 3DS for work last year, I had to start learning from scratch!

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

This is the second Trek-type ship I ever finished, using the aforementioned successor to TurboSilver, "Imagine," in 1995:

 

[Maurice]

The guy who wrote CAD 3-D on the ST and worked on Autodesk 3D Studio which became Max messaged me and said he has code to convert the model for Max, so I sent it to him and soon we may be seeing that mesh rendered with 2011 tech!

So, I sent him the 1701-D along with a much cruder 1701 refit mesh I'd done in 1986 for the Balance of Terror game demo. He replied...

Hmm. Can't find the importer, but I found the .3d2 file format document and am coding that plugin now. OMG, was that thing primitive.

...

Got the geometry importing. I need to import the lights and materials next. Biggest PITA is that I forgot about the Motorola byte order on these, and the docs I found were wrong on the palette array size. No biggie. Fun to see these again.

The first result, rendered for the first time in probably over 20 years...

 

[137th Gebirg]

This is the second Trek-type ship I ever finished, using the aforementioned successor to TurboSilver, "Imagine," in 1995:

Nicely done! That was based on the Dark Designs' Phoenix, yes?

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Well, the "Dark Designs Phoenix" blueprints were based on this mesh. I actually exported parts of it to DXF files and used them in CorelDraw 5 (or was it 3) to base the blueprints on.