My normal instinct would be to add in the missing glass in the display case, but with the way it extends past the supports at the top, it looks to me like it's supposed to be that way, more like a sneeze guard than a case. Normally with a dilemma like this, I'd try to figure out what's most logical, which requires answering the question "Why is there glass there at all?" (beyond smashing up real good). In the Star Trek future, dust and fingerprints don't seem to be an issue, so it wouldn't be to protect the models from environmental damage. It probably shouldn't be necessary as a "no touching" barrier, since the models wouldn't be super-fragile. I have the thought that it could be a transparent screen, and it might be able to activate and show some sort of infotainment program on the earlier Enterprises, but transparent screens were kind of rare in the TNG-era, and they wouldn't be necessary since holograms would make more sense for a rarely-used show-off feature that would only come up when visitors were killing time waiting for a meeting to start. Except it wouldn't be rarely used! I just checked the movie, and there are no screens in the FC Conference Lounge. So what if the sneeze guard is the screen, and it turns opaque when someone needs to show a visual aid, similar to the holographic viewscreen? And, like the holographic viewscreen, everyone decides they hate it after the shakedown, and it gets replaced with the big mainframe-looking thing and, I don't know, the bridge is moved forward four meters for some reason so the two rooms aren't directly connected anymore.
That's actually a good idea. It has always bothered me that there isn't a data display screen in this iteration of the E's observation lounge, and I like your linking it to the apparently unpopular holographic viewscreen. After I get the rest of the canon bits modeled, I may mess around with making it an opaque viewscreen with an in-game interaction.
So when people build virtual versions of these sets do we find out what would have really been visible out of those windows? Nacelles? The back half of the saucer?
I've done some tests with a model of the Sovereign....and frankly It's not as impressive a view as you'd imagine. The nacelles are nearly covered by the large mass of the hull much like a theoretical view out of the D's observation lounge.
My friend IRML made this a long time ago that really shows off what you see outside the windows well.
When I watch the Captain Ahab scene the amount of time where the viewer gets to look at the side panels and top clearly are only a few moments (from what I can tell). I think whatever you decide will be the right answer as it is almost impossible determine thru watching the movie. edit: I take that back. One of the early scenes in the movie shows clearly no side and top panels...
That video has been a big inspiration for my work on this project, and the video I made of the E bridge a few weeks back! Yeah, I'm sticking with just the front panels. I did a quick mock-up of side and top panels and it required way too much adjustment to the armature holding the panels in place, which is a no-go for me. I'd rather just stick with screen accuracy here. On another note, I got those decorative light columns generated tonight, thanks to some customizable cellulose acetate materials I found on the Substance Source library today. I had a hell of a time getting them to look just right but the Substance materials themselves were a godsend. Before finding those, I had no idea how to approach this and I wouldn't have been able to generate such a natural looking parameterized pattern like that on my own, however it did require a bit of work getting them to appear backlit.
That's an inspired solution to the lack of viewer @David cgc - and very much fits into the First Contact aesthetic. The alternative is that the two blank walls at either end can generate holographic screens similar to the main viewer. I wonder if the intention was to have screens like in the TNG set, but they were cut for budgetary reasons, since they aren't required in the script? Another option is that the table itself generates a holographic display, like we occasionally saw in early TNG.
Thank you! Actually, that was about what I was expecting. It's kind of like when I realized that anytime you look left in the Millennium Falcon you should see a whole big mess of ship. Maybe because if follows a more familiar TNG shape, but even bare bones this room is more interesting to me than the E bridge. But also maybe at this point I've gotten to the 3D equivalent of "I'd listen to Donny read the phone book".
"Covered by the marge mass of the hull" IS interesting in my book! Gives a sense of scale, and the sort of "normality" of everyday life on a ship in space.
I think it was either on the Captain's Chair or TNG Tech Manual programs where you could look out of the D's conference room windows to see the back of the saucer and some of the nacelles.
Which is not accurate at all. When we were making Stage 9, we added the ability to see the hull outside of the windows and all you could see was the flat plane of the main shuttlebay. Wasn't very exciting but it was still kinda cool.
I don't entirely remember how the view outside of the -D in the Tech Manual/Captain's Chair looked, but I suspect it was a photo of the model, which would've had the same issue as the Spock docking sequence in TMP, that you can't actually get a camera inside the model. Which TMP actually has twice over; the interior shot looking out from the officers' lounge is clearly from from a POV that's well above the bridge, and the exterior shot of the shuttle flipping over uses a matte painting of the Enterprise where the slope of the saucer is just as steep as in the bad painting from the end of the movie. I guess it avoids notice because the viewpoint is so much closer so it can be written off as a trick of perspective, and possibly because it was cropped out on pan-and-scan so it wasn't staring everyone in the face the same way as the ending painting was during the home video era.
I think you could see the hull through the windows and shuttlebay in EF2 as well, and it seemed ok...
Oh, no. They cheated big time with that view. Not close to being accurate at all, but it did blow me away 20 years ago and is honestly the view of the nacelles one would want. But they pitched the ship's aft up way far to get that view. I'll do a proper study with pics later. I think my problem is that I want the view to be as spectacular and unobstructed as the actual view of the nacelles out of the Enterprise Refit's lounge (shameless plug of my own work within my own thread )
Agreed. My hazy memory of it was indeed pretty much the shuttlebay and perhaps the very tail ends of the nacelles. I've been trying to find those damn CDs today, without much luck.