I thought some of you 3D modelers might get a kick out of this: one of the oldest 3D meshes of the Enterprise-D you're likely to see: something I made...I think...in 1988 (89 at the latest). I found the files on an old hard drive I resuscitated, and ran the software in an Atari ST emulator to spit out these renders. Bear in mind that this ship and the software used to make and render it were created in the era when PC's were using 286 processors and most people with them had EGA screens. The Atari ST was a powerhouse by comparison, with 1 to 4mb of RAM running a 16-bit processor at 8mHz! The software was written by Tom Hudson, who went on to work on Autodesk 3D Studio, from which came 3D Studio Max. I don't have the full software suite running yet, so the Z-buffering here isn't on and ergo there are some clipping issues when I rendered the model. Sorry!
Very good mesh for that age, and still looks coll today. Looks much better than some attempts that I saw, executed in modern softwares. It brings back old memories to me... In 1989 I acquired my first pc: a 286 with ambar monitor. It came with Autocad installed and a mesh of the spatial bus Columbia. Until there, all my ships were handrawn. After that "encounter", I started to play with cgi in newer pcs. Do you remember Corel Dream, from the old Corel Draw 6 suite? Played with Bryce too and, for the last Studio Max 3, at the same time that I found the old Wolfpack forums in his last days of activity.... Cool times!
Did you make several short vids with this? I think I remember downloading these from some local BBS's way back then...
Yeah, I flew it around, made it go into warp drive, even flew it into spacedock. I have the animations here someplace.
I still have Corel from early 1996, and it still works pretty good....apart from not being able to use PNG's, since they did not exist back then, and the occasional "Unexpected Heap Error".
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
Wow. Awesome. I remember the first 3D program I got my hands on was in May of 1990 - something for the Amiga called TurboSilver. The first thing I did was to lathe a saucer for the TOS Enterprise. Then I started trying to build an NCC-1701-D. Never got much past the saucer, though.
@Maurice - that looks damn good for the time and hardware! I started with Imagine shortly after which was the successor to TurboSilver. Spent many hours modelling Star Trek ships. Not much seems to have changed except the software and the number of polygons
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.
Know what that reminds me of? Remember the first Star Fox game on the SNES system, using the FX Chip? If the Enterprise were in the game, I think it would look something like that.
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.
Okay, that inspired me to dig up my first attempts at 3D. Here's an Excelsior mesh I built on my Amiga 500 around the same time you were doing your D (maybe even earlier). The program was either Sculpt 3D or Sculpt/Animate 4D.
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.