the top of that thing continually baffles me too, it looks different in nearly every image!!! argh...
ok, finally got the shapes right.....now to add the details and finish it off......its as close to the real thing as I can get....the super tricky parts were the way the rim of the saucer transitioned from curved to relatively flat, then sloped and tapered down the side of the neck.......also the top and bottom of the cobra head were super difficult to blend and look right. I guess this is because it was made by hand and not on a computer.......goes to show that if they had originally made it with cad, the shapes wouldn't have been as organic as they turned out to be. I actually had to rethink the way I use the 3d software and start thinking about how they made the curves by had and emulated that method with the software.....
here are the rough top hull contour lines.....i'll fit surfaces to them tomorrow once I've refined them
The ship really does have the lines of a flowing organic sculpture... every time I see this thread, I'm reminded why I love the 1701-D best.
actually, not that hard......everything is pretty much falling in place with the super accurate drawings of AnyStar.....just a little tweaking Its super hard to draw engineered 4 view drawings of an organic shape, but he was pretty damn close.
that neck isnt completely flat though, there is a gentle curve on it from the back of the saucer to about half-way down to the impulse vent. and like he said, it was really hard to represent in my drawings. i spent forever working on the whole neck and top of the engineering hull, drawing and re-drawing trying to get those curves represented well. I'm really enjoying watching it "come to life" it looks great so far, and keep up the good work!
Haven't had a lot of time this week, but I surfaced the bottom hull section.....it took quite a bit of tweaking to get everything right, but its good now.....I may model the pylons next and then the engines. I used my CNC machine to machine the Cobra head in MDF and it looks great, I'll try and take pics when i have time.
watertight empty engine casings(unfinished) floating on top of pylons.....still need to make the fairings....engines took some tweaking, but they went together fairly smoothly
engines no longer floating.....voila, engine fairings......these are blocky because i'm going to wait till the end to fillet all the hard edges of the model
i did some final tweaking on the neck and backbone......then started putting on the detail, im still waiting for entire model to be done before i fillet the hard edges, so ignore those for now......