So this is a design I've been fooling around with for a long while. Mostly it was just for fun, but I had an idea to use it as the setting for some fan fiction that basically never materialised.
The setting would have been the TOS era, in a section of the Federation far away from the likes of Earth and Vulcan. A place largely neglected by the powers that be, where lawlessness and piracy were common. Not a place that Starfleet sent the best and brightest to!
The Cerberus would have been an old ship - during TOS she would be at least 40 years old, and would be a ship hard used and rarely updated. Her crew were not the best and brightest of Starfleet; the ship had a reputation as being a dumping ground for those who came bottom of the class, or seriously angered some Admiral or other. On any given day a significant proportion of the major systems would be inoperative, and she's typically short on supplies.
Crew nicknames for the ship include 'The Last Stop' and 'The Killer of Careers'. On a good day, they call it 'The Hound'.
The ship was created in Blender, and these renders are tests of the texturing on the ship. Texturing is something I'm still pretty amateur at, so there's probably plenty to criticise here. But even this sure beats the non-textured version of the ship!
Recently I showed this to a friend of mine, and she said "Oh, Cerberus was a dog with three heads, so this ship is called Cerberus because it has three nacelles." And would you believe that in a couple of years of playing with this ship, that thought had never once occurred to me? Serendipity!
Actually I just like odd numbered nacelles on ships. I know Gene didn't care for it, but single and three nacelled ships just look cool to me.
I always had trouble with the shuttlebay on this ship. I could never work out how to do the clamshell doors properly - one iteration had one great big hangar door that just folded down in one piece. I finally started to get the hang of a real clamshell door just recently.
Yes, I know this texture doesn't look much like the real Starfleet hulls. I just think it looks cool, and like I said, I'm pretty amateur at this stuff so I'm not great at making my own. The basic hull pattern here is based on one created by a fella on Deviant Art who goes by FrostBo.
There are two shuttles for the Cerberus, called Little Pup and Underdog. Continuing the doggie motif of the ship! There's room for a third in the shuttlebay, just. In line with the whole 'broken down and barely functional' idea of the Cerberus, I was thinking a third shuttle would be called Old Yeller. Or possibly Cujo!
One of the fun thing about modelling the Cerberus was that I wound up doing a Starfleet shuttle and travel pod, just to have stuff to give an idea of scale.
The bridge. Easily the most complex of the interior rooms - I don't really like the usual way people depict windows as simple glowing squares. It's effective, but I like putting real glass windows in and then putting a lit room behind them. That said, most of my rooms are a simple grey box with a light panel in the ceiling. Here I went all-out, making lookalikes for TOS chairs, including a captain's chair, then creating no less than eighteen different console images to put onto the various consoles. A time consuming process, but it works well.
All the people were created with MakeHuman. You may notice that the bridge guys are all the same person copied over and over.
So that's the Cerberus. Hope you like it.
The setting would have been the TOS era, in a section of the Federation far away from the likes of Earth and Vulcan. A place largely neglected by the powers that be, where lawlessness and piracy were common. Not a place that Starfleet sent the best and brightest to!
The Cerberus would have been an old ship - during TOS she would be at least 40 years old, and would be a ship hard used and rarely updated. Her crew were not the best and brightest of Starfleet; the ship had a reputation as being a dumping ground for those who came bottom of the class, or seriously angered some Admiral or other. On any given day a significant proportion of the major systems would be inoperative, and she's typically short on supplies.
Crew nicknames for the ship include 'The Last Stop' and 'The Killer of Careers'. On a good day, they call it 'The Hound'.
The ship was created in Blender, and these renders are tests of the texturing on the ship. Texturing is something I'm still pretty amateur at, so there's probably plenty to criticise here. But even this sure beats the non-textured version of the ship!
Recently I showed this to a friend of mine, and she said "Oh, Cerberus was a dog with three heads, so this ship is called Cerberus because it has three nacelles." And would you believe that in a couple of years of playing with this ship, that thought had never once occurred to me? Serendipity!
Actually I just like odd numbered nacelles on ships. I know Gene didn't care for it, but single and three nacelled ships just look cool to me.
I always had trouble with the shuttlebay on this ship. I could never work out how to do the clamshell doors properly - one iteration had one great big hangar door that just folded down in one piece. I finally started to get the hang of a real clamshell door just recently.
Yes, I know this texture doesn't look much like the real Starfleet hulls. I just think it looks cool, and like I said, I'm pretty amateur at this stuff so I'm not great at making my own. The basic hull pattern here is based on one created by a fella on Deviant Art who goes by FrostBo.
There are two shuttles for the Cerberus, called Little Pup and Underdog. Continuing the doggie motif of the ship! There's room for a third in the shuttlebay, just. In line with the whole 'broken down and barely functional' idea of the Cerberus, I was thinking a third shuttle would be called Old Yeller. Or possibly Cujo!
One of the fun thing about modelling the Cerberus was that I wound up doing a Starfleet shuttle and travel pod, just to have stuff to give an idea of scale.
The bridge. Easily the most complex of the interior rooms - I don't really like the usual way people depict windows as simple glowing squares. It's effective, but I like putting real glass windows in and then putting a lit room behind them. That said, most of my rooms are a simple grey box with a light panel in the ceiling. Here I went all-out, making lookalikes for TOS chairs, including a captain's chair, then creating no less than eighteen different console images to put onto the various consoles. A time consuming process, but it works well.
All the people were created with MakeHuman. You may notice that the bridge guys are all the same person copied over and over.
So that's the Cerberus. Hope you like it.
