Thanks
Here are a few more clips from earlier versions of the model. Some details have changed since these test videos were made (and some of those changes were to tweak things that I noticed
in those videos), so if you see something disagreeable, there's a chance it's no longer there anyway.
This video is from July 7th, right after I converted the model to work with
OctaneRender (a GPU-based rendering engine). OctaneRender is basically the reason I'm still working on this project--this entire video rendered in 87
minutes. When I abandoned this project several years ago, the old LightWave CPU render engine (and my old CPUs) would probably have taken 87
hours to finish this. GPU rendering has been a boon for my short attention span.
This test clip is from July 26th. At this point the featureless upper primary hull has become... not-so-featureless. I'm definitely not aiming for a perfect reproduction of the 11-foot studio miniature like
Donny,
Chris PikE, and
scifieric. They've pretty much nailed the screen-accurate look. What I'm trying for is something a little different: dimensionally, the ship at a macro scale is as close to an exact replica as possible, but I'm attempting to depict what I think the
Enterprise would look like
if it was a real thing. So, all of the materials are "real" metals, ceramics, glass, etc. (at least according to the rules of Octane-world), and all of the lighting is "real" lighting from actual objects on-screen. All of the interior lights are emitted by actual light fixtures, there are "light bulbs" flashing beneath the domes of the running lights, the Bussard collector lights are shaped like the Christmas lights used in 1966, etc., As for departures from canon (e.g., the razor-thin grid lines which are actually 1" gutters cut into the hull, the clamps holding down the escape pod doors in the rust ring, the raised registry lettering on the upper primary hull, the variations in hull plating refraction, etc.) you can chalk those up to pure artistic license.
This test video is from August 1st. I toned down the glossiness and added some weathering (which is hard to see with the
Enterprise zipping by so fast), but at this point the upper primary hull was finished and I started working on the remainder of the ship.
And lastly, this one is from August 14th. When I get bored with what I'm working on I'll skip around on the model (generally, I'm trying to work down the primary hull, then the dorsal, then the secondary hull, then the warp nacelles last) but I still haven't nailed the look of the Bussards and they bug me
in. every. video. So, this video tweaks the appearance of the lights in the starboard nacelle. Still not satisfied, but I'm still a ways away from where I have to make a final decision on the look so I'm going to just pretend it's not bothering me for now.
p.s. If you want to view any of these full-screen, click the "vimeo" icon and you'll be taken to the vimeo.com website where they can be viewed in full 1080p or 4K (depending on the video).
The first model was built using 
