I've worked on this all I could today. I hope to finish them tomorrow. Be sure to view full-size (1080 HD) Thanks for looking! I'm tired. Time for bed soon.
I still need to order my TOS Bridge Chairs from Shapeways. They're an actual product on Shapeways in my shop; I just haven't had the chance to order them yet. They're available in both the TOS version and standard Burke Style 115.
I know I should be working on those TMP chairs, but I've been completely off the last couple of days, and when I'm off, I play with textures and rendering. I've been playing with the TOS chair to see if I could squeeze any more reality out of it. Instead of vinyl, it's now a synthetic leather (subtle difference, but it is what it is), and I've added some seams and filled out the seat cushion a little. I've also adjusted the colors a bit. Thank you for looking. Something tells me I need to put this in its proper environment.
Thank you. The nacelles are only placeholders for now, but the rest was eyeballed based on the Franz Joseph drawings. I probably should have set up some reference planes, but I was not really serious about that project when I started it. It was really just meant to be a modeling exercise. I became more interested as I went along. Here's the current progress of the front: I'm trying to add more curves into my modeling. I'd previously done mostly angles and flat(ish) surfaces. I've done a couple of faces, but those were many moons ago, and my techniques have completely changed since. Hell, my technique has changed since I started that other thread in the Art section (Sets Re-Imagined), and I believe I'm much more efficient now, both with time and polygons, though I do still model for 3d printing rather than games or media. I'm becoming more proficient with working in all quads. Much better than my old method of rounding edges by chamfering them several times. Oh, if people out there work with Max or Maya, the new 3rd-party Iray+ from NVIDIA is amazing. Not the Iray built into Max, but the separate plug-in. I think it's available for a couple of other packages, as well.
I do IT work for a regional office supply company, and that chair (the second post) looks like it could be one of the photos in our software catalog for our furniture salespeople. It's a weird compliment, I know, but great job.
Working in quads definitely has its challenges, but I learned box modeling before sculpting so I mainly just think in quads anyway. I've tried freehanding box modeling and it has always been too frustrating because I would second-guess myself whether proportions are correct or if I had just been staring at the model for too long. Anyway, looking at Irays features and damn! Feels like I need to dust off Maya and fire it up lol.
Wow. Thank you very much. That does seem high praise, indeed! My biggest problem with "hard surface"...er...box modeling...is ending up with too many loops. I learned of box modeling before edge loops were even a thing, but I never mastered it other than creating a bean bag chair once. Never could get the hang of it. Then I basically dropped modeling for some years and when I came back, suddenly there was this "hard surface" modeling, which seemed suspiciously like box modeling, though now people tend to start with planes, among other polygonal surfaces, and extruding edges, rather than starting with...well...a box...and adding edges. Figuring out how to keep all quads when cutting is my main challenge other than too many loops. I learned an awful lot from Arimus 3D on YouTube, honestly. Completely changed my technique, even after years of doing it in other ways (lofts, lathes, and extrusions, mostly). Vray is still the sh*t, I'm sure, but Iray is more than enough for me. And the price is right. Seems they're adding features to make it useful to the motion picture industry, too, unlike the iRay built into Max--and I think Maya now.
Hard surface modeling is just what ppl call modeling objects that in reality are 'hard surfaced' like armor on a character or space ships or a toaster. It is the opposite of 'organic modeling' in which your models are 'organic' looking like animals, leather jackets, or a rustic old bridge with mushrooms growing on it. Box modeling refers to creating models starting with a cube or other sort of primitive and adding polygons to the 'box' and creating the model; basically modeling straight in Max or Maya. Hard surface is thus not the technique or method of creating the model, it is actually the model itself. You can box model from a plane or a box; it basically just means you add boxes (polygons) to build. You can do modeling organics through box modeling but detailing and polygon efficiency is a bit harder. It is the opposite of sculpting, which evolved out of box modeling as software became more advanced where you treat your primitive like clay and manipulate it as such, and then remeshing it into workable polygons after the fact. Software like mudbox or zbrush is used for this. This lends itself to being much easier to do organic modeling, but you can also do hard surface models through sculpting but it is a bit harder. The methods are basically an inverse of each other. As for keeping your quds while cutting, yes! This is the hardest part of modeling if you wanna keep your quads nice and clean. It takes a lot of practice and patience, and is also very tedious. But! If you keep at it and treat it as a learnable challenge and make it fun, soon it becomes super relaxing and therapeutic...for me at least. Perhaps you should watch some videos on edge flow and re-topology to help with your box modeling. I've watched a lot of videos on re-topolgizing sculpts (basically you take a model that has a huge polygon count and is super detailed, and then you build a new mesh over it that is simplified and in quads.) Although you don't appear to work with sculpts first, watching people go through the process of drawing out each individual quad is a great tool for learning how to set up your own future models. Nothing looks better than nice topology. Seriously, I like get off on nice topology, haha. This is a pretty nifty video on troubleshooting problems that arise when adding and removing edges to meshes.
I stand corrected. That being said, "hard surface" modeling concepts can transfer to organic modeling practices, as well. Thanks for the video! Yesterday I spent most of the day continuing on texturing, learning more about UVW unwrapping and normal maps (yes, instead of modeling, which I should have been doing). I've always modeled for printing, so I've never really paid much attention to texturing. Well, since I used to create my screen graphics in Max (I didn't know Illustrator or Photoshop at the time). Stupid, I know, but here's just a playing around image: The floor and walls are my first normal maps, and the shuttle graphics are my first real adventures in UVW Unwrapping. I recreated the SFHQ logo a couple of years ago in vector.
Oh nice! Definitely proceed with the normal maps! They're so great for adding detail without sacrificing polys. There's also specularity maps (they are made in greyscale) which are great for deck plating and aztec patterns. After you have your UVs laid out you can just make them by hand in photoshop and load them into your model like a normal/bump map. They work best when you design them to match with the variations in height on the nromal map. Also, loving the logo!
Thanks! The previous floor included stock normal maps for iRay+ vMaterials, but I wanted to give it something closer to Star Trek with the round bumps (same as the TMP-TSFS bridge floor) and also give the image a little more interest, thus the floor and wall panels. The SFHQ logo is the one at Starfleet Headquarters on the ground at the tram station and was included in the Star Trek Sticker Book by Lee Cole, which included various logos and labels from TMP. Here's a better view of the logo:
Pardon me, but I think I'm a little too close to these images. I'm struggling to find anything that screams "CG". I mean, I feel like I could reach into the screen and touch that shuttle. I'm not tooting my own horn here. I claim no credit. That shuttle is far from finished. No, I'm talking about the Iray+ renderer. There are no actual lights in that scene, only one, giant, light-emitting texture on the ceiling. The rest is all light bouncing around, and of course, the (modified) textures on the objects, themselves. I'm definitely purchasing a license for it as soon as my 90-day trial is up. At 1/4 the price of Vray, it seems to be all I need. That is all.
I've always been fascinated with this bridge design: I'm not sure if the artist is a member here or not, but I would have collected this from SciFi-Meshes or someone's personal website way back when. That domain no longer exists. Anyway, I'm not sure I could complete anything worth showing by the end of the month, so I doubt I'd be able to enter it into March's contest. The last modified date of this file, though, is 2002. I found it on an old CD I had, along with a few other bridge designs from around that time (and several from this artist). I'm tempted to see how far I can get with it before the end of the month, though. Damn. Ooh, look...shiny!
Not specifically Trek, but Trek-inspired (this arrived in the mail today): (I don't game, but let me tell you, those multi-button gaming mouses truly come in handy in graphics programs for even shorter keyboard shortcuts; I have a gaming keyboard, as well, and every key can be reassigned to any other key combination or mouse action) Yes, that's a Florsheim foam zipper tag in the background, and I don't even have a Monster Maroon. Those arrived in the mail today, too.