OH! My bad - guess I put the cart before the horse on that one. Again, well done! 
A 3D mesh of the 1701-D from...1988?
- Thread starter Maurice
- Start date
This is the second Trek-type ship I ever finished, using the aforementioned successor to TurboSilver, "Imagine," in 1995:
Good looking design
So as not to drag Maurice's topic off course with my attention whoring, here's a link to a topic I created about three years ago concerning this model, the blueprints and my attempt to recreate it years later:
U.S.S. Phoenix
U.S.S. Phoenix
This is the second Trek-type ship I ever finished, using the aforementioned successor to TurboSilver, "Imagine," in 1995:
Good looking design
Reminds me of Madman's Defiant.
I'd love to see your model on Daz/Poser, I likes it.
One thing is for sure, I could see the following if the Doomsday Machine was a TNG episode.
Picard, after his damage control party had left, as well as La Forge, who left him the control panel to activate the 30 second auto-destruct countdown for the USS Yamato, stood and watched the planet killer get larger on the view screen. He was getting somewhat nervous as Riker told him the transporter was still not working properly. He then felt the transporter lock occur and found himself on the transporter pad on the Enterprise.
He than ran to the nearest lift and made it to the bridge. Mr. Data was continuing to count down as the Yamato was closing in on the Planet Killer gaping mouth.
Data: 8....7....6....5....4....3....
THUNK!
Picard facepalms as the bridge crew watch as the Yamato's primary hull, which is wider than the opening of the Planet Killer, stays lodged against the killer alien robot~
Picard, after his damage control party had left, as well as La Forge, who left him the control panel to activate the 30 second auto-destruct countdown for the USS Yamato, stood and watched the planet killer get larger on the view screen. He was getting somewhat nervous as Riker told him the transporter was still not working properly. He then felt the transporter lock occur and found himself on the transporter pad on the Enterprise.
He than ran to the nearest lift and made it to the bridge. Mr. Data was continuing to count down as the Yamato was closing in on the Planet Killer gaping mouth.
Data: 8....7....6....5....4....3....
THUNK!
Picard facepalms as the bridge crew watch as the Yamato's primary hull, which is wider than the opening of the Planet Killer, stays lodged against the killer alien robot~
^^^
Oh boy, do I remember this!
At the time Maurice's mesh came out, I was Contributing Editor at ANALOG Computing magazine, which was one of the two most respected Atari magazines of the time. The other one was Antic, which was also notable in history as being the publisher of CAD-3D, the software that ran Maurice's 1701-D mesh. The fellow Maurice was talking about (Tom) who has the code for translating the mesh into modern form was also an ANALOG Contributing Editor, and a great colleague.
At this same time, I worked part-time at a computer store that one of my best friends managed, back in the Technology Capital of Oklahoma known as Oklahoma City. (Hands up if y'all remember Info1!) We sold STs there, and my friend Chris was also an aspiring graphic artist. So with the animator tool that Antic released to go with CAD-3D (whose name was something like "the Animator tool for CAD-3D"), Chris took Maurice's 1701-D mesh and made an LCARS-like graphic that looked like a blueprint scan. The wiremesh would rotate in space and then halt at a common orthographic point (like the front view or the top view), where it would get shaded, and Chris added some callouts. So it looked like a damage report scan.
For its time, this was one awesome piece of animation - a $600 computer projecting something that could easily have passed as a computer scan for the real show. Then Info1 bought some commercial time on the highest-rated locally scheduled hour of television at the time, which was... Sunday night, Channel 4, ST:TNG! And in the pictures of the Info1 Software Superstore, there it was, the ST running Maurice's mesh like an LCARS scan.
You would not believe the store traffic. You have to imagine this little strip-mall outlet whose total floor space is not much bigger than most folks' living rooms. Pack it full of 150 customers on a Monday morning. There was almost no room to stand. It was like a Star Trek convention in a freight elevator. There were four telephone lines and they were all on hold. Atari would only ship about six of these computers at any one time, and they were gone in three hours, maybe less.
I don't think there was a more exciting time in the history of computing than the late 1980s. People talk about the "joy" of smartphones, but joy for me was watching the people standing outside this little strip-mall store waiting for standing room to open up inside so they could get a glimpse of the computer that did the cool LCARS display. There was an activity about that time, an air that people were really doing something with these machines now, that has been totally lost in the era of online purchasing. When I have good dreams about the past, they're about standing in the midst of this delightful chaos and watching the people witness magic.
DF "Power Without the Price!" Scott
At the time Maurice's mesh came out, I was Contributing Editor at ANALOG Computing magazine, which was one of the two most respected Atari magazines of the time. The other one was Antic, which was also notable in history as being the publisher of CAD-3D, the software that ran Maurice's 1701-D mesh. The fellow Maurice was talking about (Tom) who has the code for translating the mesh into modern form was also an ANALOG Contributing Editor, and a great colleague.
At this same time, I worked part-time at a computer store that one of my best friends managed, back in the Technology Capital of Oklahoma known as Oklahoma City. (Hands up if y'all remember Info1!) We sold STs there, and my friend Chris was also an aspiring graphic artist. So with the animator tool that Antic released to go with CAD-3D (whose name was something like "the Animator tool for CAD-3D"), Chris took Maurice's 1701-D mesh and made an LCARS-like graphic that looked like a blueprint scan. The wiremesh would rotate in space and then halt at a common orthographic point (like the front view or the top view), where it would get shaded, and Chris added some callouts. So it looked like a damage report scan.
For its time, this was one awesome piece of animation - a $600 computer projecting something that could easily have passed as a computer scan for the real show. Then Info1 bought some commercial time on the highest-rated locally scheduled hour of television at the time, which was... Sunday night, Channel 4, ST:TNG! And in the pictures of the Info1 Software Superstore, there it was, the ST running Maurice's mesh like an LCARS scan.
You would not believe the store traffic. You have to imagine this little strip-mall outlet whose total floor space is not much bigger than most folks' living rooms. Pack it full of 150 customers on a Monday morning. There was almost no room to stand. It was like a Star Trek convention in a freight elevator. There were four telephone lines and they were all on hold. Atari would only ship about six of these computers at any one time, and they were gone in three hours, maybe less.
I don't think there was a more exciting time in the history of computing than the late 1980s. People talk about the "joy" of smartphones, but joy for me was watching the people standing outside this little strip-mall store waiting for standing room to open up inside so they could get a glimpse of the computer that did the cool LCARS display. There was an activity about that time, an air that people were really doing something with these machines now, that has been totally lost in the era of online purchasing. When I have good dreams about the past, they're about standing in the midst of this delightful chaos and watching the people witness magic.
DF "Power Without the Price!" Scott
Great mesh for 1988! Even if it was done on an Atari 
Just found a site that has most of my very early stuff I did - back from 1988, the days of the good old Amiga 1000.
Some of these models are created using a text editor, mapping out each point on millimeter paper. No textures or shadows or such fancy stuff, just plain polygons. The animations would still render for hours, just like today - only today it looks slightly better
I have all that stuff on some discs but never got to transfer it to a PC. Glad I found this...
http://www.randelshofer.ch/animations/anims/tobias_richter/thu_tobias_richter.html
Just found a site that has most of my very early stuff I did - back from 1988, the days of the good old Amiga 1000.
Some of these models are created using a text editor, mapping out each point on millimeter paper. No textures or shadows or such fancy stuff, just plain polygons. The animations would still render for hours, just like today - only today it looks slightly better
I have all that stuff on some discs but never got to transfer it to a PC. Glad I found this...
http://www.randelshofer.ch/animations/anims/tobias_richter/thu_tobias_richter.html
^^^ I'll vouch for that. I've been a professional developer for 20 years now, and I don't ever remember having as much fun in coding as I did on my Atari's back in the 80's. Digging into the machine's guts and finding hidden capabilities that nobody knew existed (player-missile graphics, display-list interrupts, page-flipping, artifacting) - it was a new world that brought something different and cool almost every day. Now, it's just the same old re-hash of what came before. Just running at higher resolutions and a larger color palette. I miss those days horribly.
And I loved Analog, BTW! You guys, plus Antic and SoftSide kept me going.
That's a great story! And yeah, that was an incredibly fun time -- I would work 12-16 hour days and if I had energy after writing code all day on CAD-3D, I'd do some animation with it. You guys really did a lot of great stuff with the software and the (incredibly limited) hardware.
When I coded up the CAD-3D importer for Max the other day, I had to go look up the color register information for the palette that is stored with the .3d2 scene file, and it is so laughable -- 16 colors, 3 bits of luminance per RGB component! Auggh!
I have a website set up for the old ANALOG Computing days, at http://analog.klanky.com -- haven't updated it in a while, but there are some fun stories up there.
Forbin: Cool stuff.
DFScott: Funny, I don't recall distributing my 1701-D model, but I suppose it's possible. I know my "refit" was included with the Video Titling Design Disk, where it was used to demonstrate the warp-drive effect I'd created with Cyber Control.
Tom: I remember Andy Eddy and I asking you to add a feature to Cyber Control so that we could make objects move along a spline and point be able to calculate how to point it along the spline: those wild and wooly days where the tools evolved as people figured out what they needed to do.
I was looking through my old Cyber Studio renders and realized there was a modified "refit" model I'd tweaked after Cyber Sculpt came out. That one remains MIA. I do have a version of the Excelsior that was converted to run in a short-lived product called 3D Workshop. Gotta see if I can find a way to convert that into another format, since that's the model I built based on the blueprints you sent me.
DFScott: Funny, I don't recall distributing my 1701-D model, but I suppose it's possible. I know my "refit" was included with the Video Titling Design Disk, where it was used to demonstrate the warp-drive effect I'd created with Cyber Control.
Tom: I remember Andy Eddy and I asking you to add a feature to Cyber Control so that we could make objects move along a spline and point be able to calculate how to point it along the spline: those wild and wooly days where the tools evolved as people figured out what they needed to do.
I was looking through my old Cyber Studio renders and realized there was a modified "refit" model I'd tweaked after Cyber Sculpt came out. That one remains MIA. I do have a version of the Excelsior that was converted to run in a short-lived product called 3D Workshop. Gotta see if I can find a way to convert that into another format, since that's the model I built based on the blueprints you sent me.
Something kinda' like this?
"Due to a gross miscalculation of scale, Decker's suicide run was something of a bust."
(Forgive my derailing the thread.)
Sincerely,
Bill
Let's see someone make a render of what I typed above, now.
Here's the 1701-D model flying into a spacedock. The video is actually 4x3 with text in the area above below, but YouTube keeps treating it as if it's 16x9. Weird!
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This is the second Trek-type ship I ever finished, using the aforementioned successor to TurboSilver, "Imagine," in 1995:
She loks to much cool! Can you share teh imagine file with me? I would like to try a conversion for 3ds max.
EDITED: Never mind... seeing your other trhead, I read that you already rebuilt the mesh in a modern software, and the release was planned but... Or I´m a dumb or... Can´t see it in the downloads section of Foundation 3d. Was it released, or is hold until now?