AndyP's Trek building thread

[blssdwlf]

@batboy853 - Just echoing the great comments Donny gave you about your lighting. Wonderful modeling and it's a great start with characters in the scene.

I noticed that your space scene had the hero ship fairly lit even as she was well outside of the spacedock. Perhaps your ambient lighting is too strong (or maybe it's the World color is not black)?

 

[batboy853]

@blssdwlf For the space scene, I lit the scene using environment lighting, using a node setup using Blender's nishita sky node mixed with the planet to influence the lighting. There are definitely a few ways I can modify the current setup to give more contrast to my space scenes.

Previously I had been using a directional sun lamp to light my space scenes, looked great, but not as great as the nishita sky.

More or less the general feedback I am taking away from this, lighting should be have more contrast.

 

[Professor Moriarty]

YouTube makes everything look like washed-out shite. Vimeo doesn’t compress the hell out of videos (at least, not as much as YT).

 

[batboy853]

I guess it also depends on the platform that you are watching it on, because when I watch from my laptop the two versions appear the same, but when I watch from my 4k TV with apple TV 4k, the youtube version looks washed out.

Regardless, the suggestions from Donny & blssdwlf give me some ideas of how to improve!

 

[batboy853]

Got back into modeling this week, the first set i am working on is a sickbay set based off of the sickbay we see in Nemesis. A lot of this room I built based off of the blueprints that were recently at auction, however that just got me the basic shape of the room, the wall detailing was guestimates from screencaps from the movie. Color pallet for the room is based on the same pallet I used for my bridge set, which is based on the dauntless bridge set (I just like that color pallet)

The surgical bed was modeled from the blueprints that are out there.

The biobed, was a bit of a challenge, because the only "official" information I could find on the web on the dimensions of the bed is from the Christies auction. The dimensions seem to be wrong. When I tried finding reference material found more clear images of the bed as it appeared in the various exhibits that have traveled around the world than what I could find in episodes. then once I got it into my set I noticed the height was off compared to what we see in Nemesis. For the beds as you can see in the image from the Christies auction, they raised the beds up on a platform. You can see in the deleted sickbay scene if you look close enough, but in scenes that actually made it into the movie, they do a good job hiding the bases of the bed.

 

[batboy853]

Some small updates on the sickbay set:

Modeled the display for the biobed, as well as started modeling on of the side stations for the set. In Nemesis they dressed the sick bay using the two consoles found in the wardroom in DS9. I am struggling to find references for these two stations One of which can be seen in this screencap

After stumbling upon a pretty awesome tutorial talking about sculpting clothes for characters rather than modeling them or using a clothes simulator like Marvelous Designer, I thought I would take a stab at it.

 

[Professor Moriarty]

I'd say you stabbed that sucker pretty good! That looks very nice.

It's also good to see that the crew is keeping up with their calisthenics.

 

[batboy853]

Thanks! Right now what I think I am going to do is get the jacket / pants finalized, and then make a duplicate of it so that I can from there sculpt a DS9/Voy era uniform, and a DS9/Nem era uniform

After that I start the process over again on the base mesh for my female characters. However since they have similar topology I might actually be able to transfer the sculpt?

 

[batboy853]

Last week focused on my new uniforms, and finished the men's Late DS9 Nem era uniform. Got it rigged for my characters which was tricky, but in the end I first used Mixamo to rig the outfit, followed by tweaking the weights in Blender.

I am very pleased with how this turned out. Its much more crisp, and looks better in animations than my previous version.

 

[Professor Moriarty]

Wow, that DID turn out nicely. Do you have a female character version?

 

[batboy853]

Started working on the female version today!

 

[batboy853]

Here is a render for the female version of the uniform. Next i'll finalize the sculpt, bring it down from 1.2 million verts to something less and then start rigging it for the female base character.

 

[batboy853]

Was able to get the female uniform rigged for the base character fairly easy earlier in the week using Mixamo's auto rigger. I did not have a lot that I needed to fix with the weight painting afterwards. From here the uniform is done, however I will need to go through and update every character file I have with the updated uniforms, the next time I am ready for character animations. I have 25 characters, so that will likely take some time. When I generated the 25 characters I used the same body with-in Adobe Fuse, so when I go to fit the clothing on each character I will really only need to adjust the base uniform to match the neck size of each character.

Other improvements I have planned for each of the characters:
My new workflow for characters will include Nvidia's new Audio2Face application. It is amazing. I have already played around with it, but it came out after I finished rendering my entire short. I did not want to go back and have to re-do the entire thing. It does come with limitations. The application currently can only animate single mesh objects, so anything with loose geometry such as eyelashes, teeth, tongue, eyebrows if they are loose geometry they will not move once you set the entire thing up. (I think a future version will support this) Additionally it does not yet have actual emotions that can be applied to the face, however they are a series of neutral looks that can be applied to the character. As such until these features are implemented into Audio2Face, I need to work around the limitations. I intend to go back to each of my characters and give them particle eyelashes, and then vertex parent the rest of the loose geometry in the face to various points in the face to make it easier to animate. There is also an add-on for blender called Mocapimport, where I asked them if they could implement a feature to import the Audio2Face data as shape keys. And they delivered. This means that in future animations I will be able to use Nvidia Audio2Face for lipsync, and then utilize FaceCap on the iphone to drive the expressions on the face!

^So I'm exited for that.

Did some more work on the sickbay set today. I started modeling the central console, this console was only seen in a few close up shots in Nemesis, I'm not fully sure if I got the measurements correct. Also we never see above the screen in the movie.

 

[blssdwlf]

Very cool workflow.

 

[batboy853]

Hey Guys, its been a month since I last posted anything so here are some things that I have been working on....

My Youtube short now has over 7k viewers, and people have asked that I make another one so I have started working on a story outline that continues where my first short leaves off. The story is still very rough, but it'll help me hone in on what I should focus on modeling the next few months.

I continued working on the Nemesis Sickbay set, but I am going to be setting that aside indefinitely. I am tired of looking at the same reference material over and over and over again, with the modeling on the actual set grinding to a halt. Additionally while I like how the set looks in Nemesis, its a sickbay with 6 beds plus a surgical bed, which is large for a Nova class ship. I also was not looking forward to all the LCARS for the side stations for some reason. As you can see I got pretty far with this set. I might pick it back up at some point in time. Just not now.

Pictures of this set:

Because I do need a sickbay set, I have instead turned my attention so a set that has a lot of reference material. This new sickbay set is based off of the Stage 9 Sickbay set as it appears in Voyager, but with modifications. I started working on this version on Friday. I am wanting to make this sickbay generic, and symmetrical. For now I have a console where the doctor's office would have been in the Voyager set. There is a part of me that wants to make where the office would have been, a surgical bay with a design based off of the second version of the defiant transporter room.

The control boxes by the doors, I made 3'x3' each. I am not sure if that is the correct size, I modeled the detailing off of a screenshot. I am still debating what I want to put behind the biobeds on the wall. I have also noticed that I incorrectly modeled the light fixtures that appear next to the biobeds (each grouping of lights should have 3 sets not 5.). Oh and I also intend to do something with the carpet, such as the two tone that we commonly see on the show.

 

[Rekkert]

Nice! Not only a better fit for a Nova, a much nicer layout overall, IMO

 

[Rusty0918]

Well, I wasn't too crazy about the Nemesis sickbay, it was hastily constructed because the Voyager sickbay which was used in the previous two movies was not available (it got torn down).

 

[Nays]

Really nice work!

 

[batboy853]

Work continues on the sickbay set, I will need to make a few changes to the hanging computer terminals that are by the doors as I think I may have made the radius on the edges too large, when comparing it to watching voyager.

The past two weeks I have been working on making some props to go on the shelves in sickbay as well as a tricorder. The tricorder has taken a lot of work.

Petri dish thingy

Hypo-spray loader

Genetic reader / Display

Special thanks to @JoeRalat for providing me with a video that shows the dimensions of the genetic reader.

The Tricorder I have made does not yet have the medical scanner, but it will serve as the basis of the medical scanner. A challenge that I had is that originally I put the materials that drive the blinking lights behind faces that had a transmissive material on them, which looked correct however I found that this hid the emissive materials from the emission pass in blender.

Because of that I used a material setup for the blinking lights similar to what @Rekkert posted a few pages back regarding how he sets up his displays. I'm not 100% happy with this setup in this instance but for now it's good enough.

Hope everyone has a good weekend!

 

[batboy853]

Mid week update!

Made further refinements to the computers that are hanging on the walls/above the beds, while watching voyager I realized I made some wrong measurements. Started working on the okudagrams on the computers and main console. This week I'll either work on some animated Lcars for the displays or medical equipment. I'm also thinking of adding some stools so that characters can sit. I think I've found references to a sample of the stools found in the voyager sickbay with measurements to go off of.