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Donny's Late TNG Era Interiors

It's possible, but IIRC those are quite a bit wider and deeper than what we saw.

I had to repair one once, when I accidentally drove my in-laws' SUV into a low-clearance parking garage and forgot one of those stupid things was on the roof. Quick-dry JB Weld and textured black paint was my friend on that day. :lol:
 
I've spent a fabulous 4 day weekend (due to taking an extra day for my birthday to extend an already lengthy 3 day weekend) working out the corridors surrounding the engineering set, which was a task due to scant reference. Starting with a floor plan of the engineering set and corridors, I was able to get the footprint correct, but fleshing out the majority of the set pieces' dimensions relied on abundance use of frame-by-frame screen captures and perspective-correcting bits and pieces of those, and then taking those into my modeling program and modeling with those as reference plans (which is my usual technique, but this required so much of it). For those wondering, the measurements of this two-deck set would suggest the decks of the Sovereign are ten feet from floor to floor of the next deck. The corridors themselves have a height of 8 feet with space for a a 2 foot tall gangway hatch between them.

Here are the usual two views that will accompany these renders, with "Daytime" (Insurrection) and "Nighttime" (First Contact) lighting schemes. *

NOTE: The detailing of the braces stretching across those round light portals are conjecture, as I am only aware of their general shape.



This is the scene of the Borg fight in First Contact, although you may not notice it without all the Borg stuffs adorning the walls, and the tight nature of all those shots. (Note: the hole in the ceiling behind the Borg's head is where they filmed the crew coming down out of the hatchway earlier in the scene, albeit without the Borgification. There was a bit of corridor constructed above this set that the crew later exits out of the center door on Deck 15 via the catwalk)



We get a couple good (but blurry) views of the area in Insurrection:



This ceiling plan helped lay down the foundation immensely, not only for this set of corridors, but the main one as well, since so many of those "main" segments branch off from this Engineering junction:


And this shot from the TNG Sketchbook helped a lot as well:


I still have to do some tidying up as far as details go for this section, and I have to generate the giant 14 foot engineering pressure door to call this bit of corridor complete.

*It is most likely that the corridors in "First Contact" were lit darker/bluer as part of the red alert condition the ship was in, and that in normal conditions the ship was lit with high warm lights, like it was in FC’s behind-the-scenes photos of these sets and in Insurrection. For the purposes of this project, however, I'm designating the darker/bluer lighting scheme as "Nighttime" and bright/warm lighting scheme as "Daytime", frankly, because trying to drop in-game/realtime from the bright scheme to the darker scheme for Red Alert would be impossible to do in Unreal due to the demands that lighting such a scene would place on a computer. Scenes like that would have to be lit almost completely dynamically with a ton of dynamic light objects due to the nature of these corridors, and I'm relying on static light bakes (which cost almost nothing at run time) instead. However, you can still press "Shift-R" while in-game to make the Red Alert indicators flash dynamically, in either mode, which was a good compromise.
 
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First off, happy belated birthday Donny! I thought people were supposed to give you presents, not you giving them to us. :p

Second, I love, love this. The Enterprise-E corridors are my favorite corridor design, and it's nice to see them finally getting the overdue love they deserve.
 
Happy late birthday Donny! :p

Incredible research and work on this! The idea of having both lighting schemes as 'daylight' and 'nightlight' is a cool and realistic take. Something I didn't like on TNG is that sometimes it was supposed to be late at night yet the corridors were brightly lit, so you got no sense of the hour.

It's a shame we never properly got to see this area open and in its full glory in a movie, but damn if your work doesn't look like what we never got either way; those two shots are incredible, honestly look like photos of a real place.
 
These are fantastic, I love the detective work you had to do to piece it all together. It's always been a space I struggled to visualise, so amazing to see it clearly after all these years!

Happy birthday. :)
 
Yes, so glad you're doing this. It was too hard to figure out what was going on from the fragments available. I agree that it's frustrating when wide shots, if they were even taken, are lost in the final edit. Show the sets off!

Probably more frustrating for set designers who get excited to see their work on screen, then it's all dark closeups. :)
 
Jeepers that is a cavernous set! I wonder why they never showed it off properly?

Seeing Donny's version brings to mind the big central atrium in the middle of the Enterprise saucer in STID. You don't really see open multi-level interstitial spaces like that on Trek ships pre-2009, though I believe some versions of the Enterprise-D blueprints had them on that ship.
 
Jeepers that is a cavernous set! I wonder why they never showed it off properly?
Well, I think my camera angle and field of view is making it look bigger than it appears. This area has a ceiling height of 18 feet, whereas the engine room itself is 27 feet. Here's another image with some 6 foot tall figures for scale (pardon the WIP engineering isolation door with temporary textures on the right of the frame)

Still, more expansive than any other corridor set we saw pre STID
 
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Donny, did you see those Nemesis set plans that were just posted in the blueprint thread? You kinda have to do them now. :)
 
Donny, did you see those Nemesis set plans that were just posted in the blueprint thread? You kinda have to do them now. :)
Oh what great timing. Those prints of the weapon's locker have the schematics for the support brace that is in the entryway to my engineering hallway above. Coulda used this a couple days ago! ;)

But on that note, I'm more partial to the quarters set seen in Insurrection than I am the one in Nemesis, so I dunno if I'll be making that one. I like the sets much more as they appear in First Contact, so I'll most likely be sticking to those as my standard, with the Insurrection appearances of rooms we didn't see (Transporter, Quarters) as the standard for those. I didn't really like the colder, harsher portrayal of the interiors in Nemesis, so I doubt I'll go down the road of recreating the sets as they appeared there.
 
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Well, I think my camera angle and field of view is making it look bigger than it appears. This area has a ceiling height of 18 feet, whereas the engine room itself is 27 feet. Here's another image with some 6 foot tall figures for scale (pardon the WIP engineering isolation door with temporary textures on the right of the frame)

Still, more expansive than any other corridor set we saw pre STID
Again, just an amazing space. A shame the only time we got to see anything as cool as this on the Enterprise-D was Stellar Cartography in Generations (and even that ended up being less than originally envisioned... damned budgets :p ).
 
The emergency pressure door to Engineering was never seen in it's entirety. This door is, in fact, 14 feet tall. A very small portion of it is seen in First Contact, but it's covered by greebles and Borg alcoves when Picard and Company arrive on the scene.

It is the door that Data is grabbed through near the end of that scene:

if you queue up the movie, you can see it moving upward in preparation to grab Data in this shot, right between Worf and Picard's head, and behind the giant conduit.

When Data attempts to escape, you can see the door fully open here, with a recess in the floor where the door meets the deck.


We get the most complete look at the door in Insurrection, as it is dropping in this scene during the space battle:


However, we only see the bottom half, and never the top. I'm assuming the top half is a mirror of the bottom, so that's the way I've decided to model it.





I've even modeled the details in the floor recess (although there's nothing on the other side yet!)


When this door was engaged, one could enter engineering through one of two side doors, located in the corridors connecting this atrium. It is at one of these doors where Data and Picard attempt to gain entry into Engineering (I have plans to model the panels they access, but haven't yet, so I've left the right side of this doorway conveniently out of view ;))


And here are two other shots of the atrium, before I move on to finishing off the remaining bits of the corridor kit.

 
This door is, in fact, 14 feet tall. A very small portion of it is seen in First Contact, but it's covered by greebles and Borg alcoves when Pica is the door that Data is grabbed through near the end of that scene:
Thanks to this shot from FC it always seemed that the door was much narrower than it really was! Then there's the other shots from FC and INS which don't reflect that at all!
Thanks for clearing this mystery up at last:techman:
 
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