Made me think of the Vengeance for STID...I was thinking Mars Attacks!
So, I made this.
- Thread starter Professor Moriarty
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Well, they were. Fortunately, I discovered a quick and dirty fix, and it's the same thing I had to do years ago with my old LightWave Enterprise when light leaks started materializing: I made the material in that area of the ship double-sided. Problem solved.
I agree. A little shiny goes a long way. The two main offenders were the support arms and the rotating "power modules". I changed the support arms from a mirror-like chrome to a brushed aluminum finish, but I kept the copper toruses (tori? Really? dumb plural) on the power modules because that was a key design feature of the WNMHGB phaser rifle. The power module housing (which had a mirror-smooth gold finish) was reskinned to a more muted titanium casing.I think the metal is a tad shiny though and seemed out of place. Phaser sound and beam color is great! (And I just like replaying the video for the camera zoom in)
@Professor Moriarty - Nice! I like the toned down brushed metal arms. I've got to ask - are these super high poly models to allow for such wonderful close-ups or are they subd?
They are super-high poly models (about 20K per cannon) that are not a part of the main Enterprise model; they're only imported into the scene when needed. Now, just about every part that you're looking at that has a curve was sub-D modeled, but the polys were then frozen. I'm still getting the hang of creating an entire model in sub-D; I'm using that technique on the planet killer, but I've just gotten very used to hard-surface modeling with polygons so that's what I've done here. Octane is so ridiculously fast (both of these scenes took about 20-30 seconds to render) that I've gotten spoiled and lazy; I don't really pay too much attention to polygon counts anymore. (The number of materials in a scene... now that is something Octane makes me keep an eye on.)
@Professor Moriarty - thanks for the info. Ditto for me on sub-D modeling as I'm still figuring it out. Definitely love the speed benefits of Octane for using the GPU to render but I haven't tried pushing the polycount. Have you hit the GPU limit yet for Octane where it has to use your system ram instead of GPU ram?
I've not gotten to that point yet. The Enterprise and Constellation weigh in at a hefty 2.5 million gross tons polygons each, but even when rendering at 8K (7680 x 4320) Octane is only gobbling up a little over 3 GB of GPU RAM and I still have nearly 5 GB of GPU RAM free, so I'm not running into out-of-core territory yet. The base Enterprise model only has 14 RGB and grayscale image textures; I've been trying as much as possible to do things the Octane way with procedural textures (e.g., the aforementioned Dirt Texture). The Constellation is a different story; I've been "damaging" her for a couple of weeks now and that includes applying image maps for blast and burn damage, and the memory usage is definitely creeping up.
@Professor Moriarty Although the current iteration is fun to watch, it probably makes more sense from a space-saving point of view if they stored in the forward facing position.
At 2.4 meters in length they’re too long to fit through the doors if they’re lowered while pitched at an angle less than 65°. Sure, I could shorten the cannons to the length of that dinky mini-***** hanging off the lower sensor dome, but I don’t want the Klingons making snide remarks about our starship's... er... manhood. (Besides, whether the cannon is stored horizontally or vertically it takes up the same amount of volume either way...!)
Make bigger doors.
But you would need a much smaller armature because your vertical translation wouldn't be as much. If, in the stored position, the business end was elevated so that the phaser was flush* with the curve of the hull then the whole assembly would store in a nice compact triangle. The vertical translation would be a third or less of the current setup and the business end would only have to drop a bit to be in the forward firing position.
*(by flush I mean parallel to the trend line of the hull's curve.)
Yep - basically, have the phaser cannon part actually rotate upward when retracting into the hull. It doesn't even need to fully rotate up to save a lot of internal space.
I get what you’re saying, but I want to fit the cannons so that they are at approximately the same position where the phasers came out of the ship most of the time in TOS. Also, I’m trying to make the doors fit within the available profile of one of the pie wedges defined by the thin pencil lines drawn on the lower saucer (which on my model are 1 cm-wide gutters for the deflector grid). If I made the doors longer, they would cross the innermost concentric circle on the grid. ETA: Correction: extending the length of the doors would cause them to intrude on the space required for the photon torpedo tube doors which you can glimpse in this video.
ETA #2: oh wait, I didn’t get what you were saying but now I do. To visualize it on a human being, you’re suggesting that I fold my forearm up so that it is parallel to my upper arm. For this arrangement, the forearm would be the phaser cannon, and the upper arm would be the brushed aluminum support armature. Yeah, that probably would take less vertical space.
And fuck yeah, I think it just looks cool
ETA #2: oh wait, I didn’t get what you were saying but now I do. To visualize it on a human being, you’re suggesting that I fold my forearm up so that it is parallel to my upper arm. For this arrangement, the forearm would be the phaser cannon, and the upper arm would be the brushed aluminum support armature. Yeah, that probably would take less vertical space.
And fuck yeah, I think it just looks cool
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Just offering up suggestions. No offense intended and no comment I make should be taken as any kind of disapproval (unless I actually say that).
FWIW, your phaser beam effects and sounds are the most satisfying expression of phasers firing period.
I was actually thinking 3/4 through a bicep curl (to draw on your analogy) but if there are constraints to that idea then obviously it won't work.
FWIW, your phaser beam effects and sounds are the most satisfying expression of phasers firing period.
I’m rather pleased with how the sound turned out. 
Hiya... Does anyone have a closeup of the printing to the right and aft-ward of the port-side doors on the restored shuttlecraft Galileo prop on display at Space Center Houston? For that matter, does anyone have a closeup on the detail underneath the port "wing"? I've circled the areas of interest below... any assistance will be greatly appreciated!
Oh, that's nice. I like this idea, and as others have noted, a bit of a submarine feel. I can definitely see that as part of the tense back and forth like submarine films. "Outer doors opening."
From "The Galielo Seven":
SPC_ 48A <—I think the _ is a K or R
WE-128
__ 5621 <—Not sure about the first two characters
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