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3D interiors in Blender

Chugging along with multiple commissions (including some non-Trek work that I can't show due to contracts but yay its exciting), and now I'm focusing on one I actually have going since late last year, but that was delayed due to an extensive "pre-production", shall we say. Essentially it's a brand new bridge that we designed entirely before actually getting into the 3D part of it.

And this bridge is for the USS Orion NCC-60120, first of its class. Designed and modeled by DJCurtis for Bridge Commander, the Orion-Class is essentially a Constitution sized Galaxy. While some might see it as derivative, personally I quite like it, taking all the good aspects of the Galaxy and presenting them in a much more logical size for a "workhorse" starship. It's supposed to have been a testbed for all the Galaxy technologies; newer than the 'Wolf 359 fleet', but a bit older than the Galaxy-Class itself.

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The brief was "what if the TNG production had enough money to properly convert the Constitution bridge set into a TNG-era 'bridge of the week' set?". To that end, the actual walls are taken from the Connie, but everything else will be brand new (well, except for the conn/ops consoles and Captain's chair, obviously). The walls will have four door alcoves (two at the front, two at the back), and feature standing consoles similar to those from TMP (left side of the image), but re-imagined with a fully TNG-era aesthetic.

This is build to be highly modular, again imagining how the production might have done it so that it could be easily redressed as needed for different episodes. The new standing consoles are separated into individual pieces, while both the wooden rails and the bottom can be removed to create different looking consoles. In the future we might end up doing different versions of this bridge, from early TNG to late TNG, to showcase how it might have changed through the years, and to take advantage of this modularity.

Anyway, here's how its looking so far! Keep in mind, only the basic shape of the floor is in place, a blue carpet will be added on top of the red one, just like on TNG.

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I'll be watching this one with great interest; the big combined three-piece tactical console looks like something that (from a design philosophy) would have been at home on Probert's concept bridge.
 
I LOVE that USS Orion - that is one beautiful ship! You somehow managed to merge the best parts of the Ambassador and Galaxy and build a very well-balanced design.
 
A lot more work done all over. Most of the wall displays are now in place (lacking their acompanying consoles for now), as well as the door alcoves. The front ones have half-size doors, and while they might look very thin due to how tall they are, they're still comfortably wide (72cm, to be exact, wider than the doors on my house). I've also added some floor level lighting to the new standing consoles, plus finished the pit area steps, adding some subtle lighting to them similar to that from 'Generations'.

The whole color pallet was changed to reflect the early TNG aesthetic of the ship. The floors, wood details, and ceiling/console lights were all swapped. The walls are the same color they were before, but due to all the changes they look very different. The Captain's chair was likewise changed to its season 1 version, though I took the chance to do some rework on it, as my mesh was showing its age.

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Question, if you're making it more modular, why didn't you go with the single console pattern to the wall of WOK and after and went for the matchy-matchy wall striping of TMP?

I mean I love this aesthetic, I was just curious.
 
@ashefivekay: Well, the simple reason is that my client wanted the panels done this way, emulating the side panels on the Enterprise-D bridge. There's nothing saying that these panels aren't broken up at the middle, that way you could mix and match them all the same with one another, or create a new panel that serves as an end point for two of the existing ones. :)

I've tweaked the colors a bit more, and finished up the carpet pattern and doors. I've also added more details to the ceiling viewport. Plus I'm adding some of the LCARS and red labels.

I'm still amazed by how big this bridge looks, despite both the outer diameter and the center pit diameter being the exact same as on the Constitution refit bridge. I assume this is an optical illusion due to the rails being angled outward, plus the slightly higher ceiling.

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I'm glad you moved the captain's chair to a conventional base rather than the "floating" one they used in S1. While a console in 2364 made of whatever futuristic substance Starfleet makes their consoles from could probably support the weight, I'm not sure that the non-futuristic materials used in 1987 could accomplish the same goals. :p
 
Nice to see some of the ergonomic suggestions from the TMP bridge making their way back in :)

The only comment I have is wanting to see the TMP bridge one-table helm/nav console make a return. Not wild about the TNG consoles... probably because of how often they seem to appear over traditional ergonomics from TOS. Nevertheless, the TNG consoles reduce bridge clutter and help it tie more into TNG, which is what you're going for *shrug*.
 
I can't even tell you how much I love this.

My own complaint (if you can call it such a thing), is how the captain's level split is a straight line. This seems incredibly unlikely to me, from either the TMP era (angles to make wedge platform lines) or TNG era (which, if there'd been a pit, would surely have been curved one way or the other, as with seemingly everything else). The only way I can make sense of it is if it's required for and/or looks right when the chairs for the forward stations are added. Otherwise, it just sticks out to me from the way that the rest of the bridge flows and merges styles.

Looking forward to being proven wrong though!
 
I'm really liking this so far. The new consoles are great and it's clear there's a lot of ways you could rearrange things to make unique bridges - splitting the rear console, adding in extra chairs, etc.
 
@cardinal biggles: Haha, I actually like that floating support more, but its true that I certainly wouldn't trust it in real life. :p

@Jedman67: I'd have to do the Connie for that hahaha, I'm sure I'll get there one day.

@Norsehound: Yeah, something like 80% of all the bridges I made have the TNG style consoles at the front, so I certainly see your point, I'd like to have something else there as well; however for this particular bridge idea of building it as if in 1987, they'd have to be there. :)

@Spaceship Jo: I hadn't actually see it that way before, but now that you mentioned it I can't help but realize you're right. Once the chairs for conn/ops are in place I'll do some experimenting to see what I can come up with. :)

@The Librarian: Thanks, glad you're liking it!

Here's another little commission I've been doing on-and-off this last month: the bridge for the Akyazi-Class USS Tioga NCC-1063. This is how it looked like in the 2330's, 40 years into the ship's lifespan; so the consoles, colors, and aesthetics are more in line with the Enterprise-C than with the TMP era.

This means TNG style conn/ops stations and red labels, and a much more colorful color pallet for the LCARS, among other things. Hope you like it!

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Well, this week has certainly been interesting... Several commissions I've been doing are on-hold as some of my clients are suddenly without income or would rather save what they have, which is totally understandable. That means that some of the projects I'd been spending time on won't be shared for the time being (don't worry, the Orion bridge is still moving forward).

Plus, as more and more people are staying in their houses here, the local Internet infrastructure is starting to collapse, hence I've been having longer periods without service every day. Today the whole country has officially entered a state of mandatory quarantine until the end of the month, so that will probably get worse. Still, a small price if more cases can be prevented by the measure. I'm healthy myself but I live with an immunosuppressed family member, so we're taking extra precautions at home.

Mentally I'm very much drained, and the constant outages mean I can't even game for a while to recharge. It's even been raining so I can't work on the backyard... So, what else but to model something to keep the spirits up? I had the idea of turning my Potemkin interiors into their TMP era counterparts, but rather than using the Potemkin itself, why not modify them for the actual USS Excelsior...? But before I can do that, I'll have to work on the bridge...

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Very early stages as you can see. The ceiling is completely new, as are the buttresses. Given how vertical the wall consoles are on this bridge when compared to the Hathaway/Enterprise-C style consoles I've used on the Constellation and others, the buttresses aren't as angled as they were on those bridges, and thus they don't stick out as much.

I certainly give no guarantee of keeping working on this one continuously, I'd keep at the commissions I have going if my Internet allows, but it's very much dependent on things outside of my control.

For now, keep safe everyone.
 
I appreciate the sentiments, but don't worry I still have more than enough to go around, it's just tiring to invest time and creative energy on things just for them to be delayed.

Some more work on the Excelsior. Besides some material and light changes, I've heavily reworked the wall consoles I already had created for the Odyssey bridge in order for them to fit in with the frame here. I'm not exactly sure how accurate they ended up being, it seems every time I try to correct an issue with them, two more popped up, but given the limited accurate data I have they seem to be correct. I'd love to have some construction blueprints of this one... All the buttresses and some of the consoles are also placed off center intentionally, just as they were on the set. The research that @Donny did for his Enterprise-A bridge has been invaluable, though I know I won't achieve the same breathtaking results here.

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