I also love seeing how Okuda refined the style he established with the displays in TVH for their use in TFF and beyond. And just saying that above sentence is making me yearn to one day build a TVH Ent-A bridge. I'm getting all kinds of motivated again. I'm actually itching to touch up my TWOK bridge soon (and finally get around to making both a TMP Enterprise bridge and TWOK Reliant bridge) so it would make sense to build a TVH bridge then as well. With CBS shutting down Stage 9 and what that means for planning my projects, I've abandoned the idea of having a release mindset and am just going to continue modeling wherever my motivation takes me (which I've been guilty of in the past anyway ).
Donny, is there any chance you'll return to the great stuff you did on TOS? It's such an enlightening thread.
Of course! There's plenty of that I want to go back and do. I'm just following my motivation right now. I was heading towards burn out quick with that project so I'm just taking a healthy break.
I understand that. I'm finding that having two or three projects that I can bounce around on seems to work.
There's more love for the TVH bridge than I actually thought! And all this talk about it has me shifting gears again. I dipped my toes into some TMP-TVH era stuff again over the weekend and my motivation is leaving the Ent-A bridge for now. Dammit, Jim, why can't I just focus on finishing one thing before I start another? Stay tuned.
If it keeps you motivated to work on different stuff, I don't think anybody here will complain about that!
I'd love to see a finished version of that bridge. Always felt it got a little shortchanged, especially considering Mike Okuda worked up console graphics for every station, not just the few we saw.
Woo-hop! I’ve been hoping for the TVH bridge for years! So okay, here is a thought expirement I had. What if TNG never happened? What I mean by is is: suppose the movie era sets were never modified and repurposed for TNG. So that when production began on TFF, all the sets remained in the condition they were in at the end of TVH. What would they have looked like for Star Trek V? Since the bridge was only onscreen for a few seconds in TVH, the static plexiglas graphics were fine for the purpose. Presumably they would have been supplemented with other dynamic display or effects in the next feature film. What about engineering? We wouldn’t have the blue neon tube lights from TNG’s warp core but would we still have the swirly intermix effect? That wasn’t something they could just “turn on” - it took a special effects artist to realize in TMP and TWOK. It was apparently so much of a hassle that it want used in TSFS and TVH. The former used a modified ladder set in to stand in for engineering. Even the engine room in Excelsior had the “swirly parts” of intermix chamber just out of frame. And TVH had no scenes in engineering. Now they figured out a more feasible way to realize the effect for Voyager. But that wasn’t until 96. Would they have been there by ‘89? The set’s forced perspective chamber was also problematic to film - so much so that the emergency bulkhead was dropped in TWOK to block the FP portion allowing for more freedom with camera angles. What would they have done for ST5 is they still had the set in that configuration at their disposal? The engineering we saw in TFF was really a glorified corridor set for the escape and pursuit scenes - used more as the lower bowels to avoid being seen by the more populated main corridors - rather than a hub of the engines and main power that engineering of the first three films served as. I find it hard to picture the TMP/TWOK engineering set being used for those engineering scenes in TFF - it just doesn’t have the room to allow characters to walk/run for any distance. So a new set might have been created regardless. By it would allow some work of Scotty working on things to fix them. But back to the main topics I am excited to see where your inspiration leads you Donny!
Just tell yourself that they are concurrent projects ( <---- looks at his own harddrive, notes the numerous concurrent projects there) okay may be not Besides, based on what I've observed from you in the past, the thing you should really fear the most is the release of a new version of the Unreal Engine
Well, they've honestly just been steadily updating Unreal Engine 4 for 5 years now, and I don't see them abandoning this iteration of the engine any time soon (nor will I). Tbh, one of the reasons I want to retouch some of my TWOK-era sets is due to some of the improvements they've made to the Unreal engine over the years since I last touched the project! I don't wanna post screens yet, but just some of the things I've been tinkering with are greatly exciting me. My current plan is to revisit the project with the goal in mind of making everything easily modifiable to represent three versions of the sets...TMP. TWOK, and hopefully..TVH. With the amount of programming I've learned with my TOS project, I want to bring the same interactive sense as well.
I recently acquired a panel using the correct control panel as seen in Star Trek 6. I will be producing a video with detailed measurements. When I make the video would you like me to post it to here Donny?
I personally love the GNDNs in TMP, even if they are ultimately useless or even dangerous. They just look cool to me.