I hadn't thought of using displacement maps to do the windows in the hull. If you're not going to have a room behind it, that's actually a brilliant way of doing it. And it turns out fantastic.
The optical trickery you use for the windows to make them appear inset is amazing!
I'm totally stealing this technique for my next ship project. Very clever!
Thank you all! When I attempted this with my TOS Enterprise last year, I wasn't sure it wasn't going to work, but it does beautifully. However, I did actually model the windows for the Rec Deck, Officer's Lounge, and Botanical Section that I will, at some future date, place low poly versions of those sets behind so they can be seen from the exterior. But for the smaller windows I didn't find it necessary to build 3D sets behind, since it's not necessary at this resolution. I will say, however, there is another drawback to this method. At very extreme angles, the illusion of displacement is shattered, but if this were part of a releasable project, I would solve this by just never letting the player get that close to the windows OR I would swap out the section the player is close to with a higher-poly model that actually has the windows modeled.
I meant in terms of geometry/detail. Mostly the modeling.
Ah. Well, I dunno about my model being the most accurate in terms of geometry/detail.
@Viper's model is pretty close, but he has taken some liberty with a few of the details, diverging from the filming model. And the Director's Cut model looks very accurate as well. There are a ton of other 3D models of the Refit floating around out there, and I haven't seen them ALL, but I'm willing to bet that mine, when finished, will be the most accurate game-res model out there
You know, if you're accounting for a bunch of variants with the registries and whatnot, what about the first version of the B/C deck structure? That could be a cool mod to apply to a different ship.
I might explore that at a later date. As soon as I get this screen-accurate variant done, I'll be moving on to more interior sets, but I like the idea of periodically coming back to both this model and the interior bridges and doing more variants. I just can't spend more than a month or two on any given sub-project without getting fatigued and ready to explore other things. I do want to make a proper variant with the additional pin-striping and previous bridge module of the Refit at some point, just for fun.
I build things extremely modular these days (compared to how I built them in 2014) so that making variants will be easy. It's just making the additional pieces that's time consuming.
For instance, since each separate structure of the ship is built as a seprate piece, it would be easy/fun to swap out the torpedo launcher geometry with another variant, say, based on one of Probert's other concepts:
It would just mean taking the time to construct other variants of that geometry.
Is this done centrally? Part of me has visions of you typing in a single place saying "This is the USS Astaire registry NCC-1925," and everything updates automatically. The other part of me has visions of it having to be done manually, separately typing in about 50 different labels...
I haven't quite worked out how I'm going to generate the registries yet, but I assure you I won't be hand placing every letter. I'll probably type out the names/numbers in Photoshop, set it to adhere to the proper semi-circular path as a layer over my saucer texture maps, edit the borders of the font to be red, and then export that layer out as a texture. Either way I'll find out tomorrow night when I get to generating the decals.
