OT: flyby animation

[The Axeman]

Not exactly Trek related, but it does currently use Michael Giachinno's music and I haven't posted anything here for a while.

http://youtu.be/C9gjGwA5nKk?hd=1

A guy I've been helping with model making advice now and again has been making more and more complex models with Sketchup, but hasn't the facilities to make a nice render or animation. He asked if i could do a picture or something with his new battleship design.

I made a few pictures, and then though 'what the hell, I'll do a flyby animation and see what it looks like moving'. This in turn led to me thinking 'what the hell, I'll make a little scene of it', and so added a setup where the little asteroid exploration ship inadvertantly witnesses a short battle with the ship and an as yet un-animated adversary.

Plan is for me to have another monster ship appear and a faeces/fan interface occurs as missiles fly everywhere with the onlooker watching from a safe distance. This much has taken a week of overnight rendering sessions, pretty much every shot in this taking half an hour to an hour to set up and then leaving it to render overnight. Hopefully in a week or so I'll have part 2 done.

 

[Redfern]

It still blows my mind we now have the capability to produce opticals in our homes that would have left the various effects houses that worked on TOS speechless. Shoot, John Dystra working on the original Star Wars would have been stunned and what he and his crew did was bleeding edge tech at the time.

Sincerely,

Bill

 

[The Axeman]

It freaks me out too. I've been doing some work on short films for friends, adding gunshot effects, camera matching to add CG elements to live action, doing green-screen work, etc and I'm one step up from an idiot. With the new DSLR cameras giving incredible HD video quality now, the amateur film maker really can produce amazing finished products on a tiny budget.

 

[sojourner]

Nice animation! How much work did you have to do to convert the battleship from Sketchup?

 

[The Axeman]

Not a huge amount. I downloaded the trial version of Sketchup Pro which gives me 8 hours of use. It takes less than a couple of minutes to export as a .obj model so I should be ok converting for some time!

Once done as an OBJ I can then bring it into lightwave and begin the work of reducing the polygon count (Lightwave can handle polys with more than 3 sides) and sorting out the textures. Thats about it, fix the holes and retexture the model. Done.

 

[sojourner]

Hmmmm, I'd be tempted to ask you to do the same for my ship The Boundless, if I ever finished modelling her.

 

[Kaiser]

Not exactly Trek related, but it does currently use Michael Giachinno's music and I haven't posted anything here for a while.

http://youtu.be/C9gjGwA5nKk?hd=1

A guy I've been helping with model making advice now and again has been making more and more complex models with Sketchup, but hasn't the facilities to make a nice render or animation. He asked if i could do a picture or something with his new battleship design.

I made a few pictures, and then though 'what the hell, I'll do a flyby animation and see what it looks like moving'. This in turn led to me thinking 'what the hell, I'll make a little scene of it', and so added a setup where the little asteroid exploration ship inadvertantly witnesses a short battle with the ship and an as yet un-animated adversary.

Plan is for me to have another monster ship appear and a faeces/fan interface occurs as missiles fly everywhere with the onlooker watching from a safe distance. This much has taken a week of overnight rendering sessions, pretty much every shot in this taking half an hour to an hour to set up and then leaving it to render overnight. Hopefully in a week or so I'll have part 2 done.

Cool vid reminds me of some of the big battleships for Infinite Space for Nintendo DS

 

[Ziz]

Are both ships his design or is one of them yours? The big ship has a very Star Destroyer feel to it while the small one is vaguely reminiscent of the Swine Trek from Muppets "Pigs In Space", of all things, at least to my eye.

 

[Redfern]

The smaller ship is one the AxeMan modeled. He describes it as a "near future type NASA ship". I'm guessing that to mean he was inspired by NASA, but ultimately it's his design. You can even download and render scenes with it if you wish.

http://www.kennyscrap.com/models_scfi4.htm

Sincerely,

Bill

 

[The Axeman]

Yeah, the little one is mine, the Star Destroyer type one was designed and built by Grahf at the Stardestroyer.net forums (funnily enough). It will be available for download from my site shortly as well, in lightwave and .obj format too. I'm trying to convert all my stuff into as many usable formats as possible, but it takes a bit of time.

Swine Trek, eh? I suppose, a little bit, but it was actually inspiried by the Palamino from The Black Hole. I was also making NASA style stuff for an animation at the time, so I did the same with this. I gave it vernier trhusters, white surfaces, all that stuff, but the engines are the bit that are tough to make NASA-like.

 

[sojourner]

I used an image I found of what a proposed NERVA engine would look like for the "impulse" engines on this ship. (click the thumb for full image)



It was an idea for what I thought Earth's first operational warpship would look like. Only capable of about warp 1.2 and limited to activity in the Sol system. Very primitive. No artificial gravity. It was going to have a crew of about 16 with a single spine mounted laser for armament and no real defenses though I did toy with having bolted on plates of ablative armor over the whole thing.