USS Grandeur - One... More... Time!

[candida]

Ptrope said:

candida said:
Wouldn't those windows cut into the roof - which are beautiful - mean the running light was constantly irritatingly bleeding into the briefing room ?

If that's a running light, keep in mind that in space, there's no atmosphere to refract or reflect the light back into those windows; if a direct line of sight can't be made between the light source and the window opening or frame, it shouldn't show up to the occupants.

And, hey, the windows may be polarized to block it, anyway .

I thought there was, just a line of sight as it's quite an erect little niblet of a running light...

but I like the poloarsation explanation

 

[the citizen]

Hey! How about mirrior tinting on the windows... LOL Seriously... wouldn't that eradicate a few "exterior lighting" problems?

 

[Vektor]

Well, it may not look like much, but I've been doing lots of little tweaks all over the ship. Here you can see that the phaser strip and groove it's recessed into have been shortened and rounded off. I also put a slight curve on the anterior face of the window niche below the phaser strip to make it flow a little better with the surrounding lines.

And here is some further refinement of the bridge module, probably pretty close to the final version.

More to come.

 

[Titan Designer]

This continues to look fantastic. Can't wait to see it with the textures.

 

[Professor Moriarty]

Vektor said:

What is that slightly bent black & gray line to port and aft of the bridge dome?

 

[largo]

Professor Moriarty said:
What is that slightly bent black & gray line to port and aft of the bridge dome?

a person standing on the hull, for scale. they're casting a shadow towards the foreground, which forms the bend.

 

[Vektor]

largo said:
a person standing on the hull, for scale. they're casting a shadow towards the foreground, which forms the bend.

Bingo.

 

[the citizen]

Yeah, that's the little blue guy from many moons ago, who filed a complaint for never having a little blue girl to spend his stand-around time with. :-)

 

[ThomastheCat]

Titan Designer said:
This continues to look fantastic. Can't wait to see it with the textures.

No joke. I'm just worried it's going to look so good that my monitor will explode!

 

[Adagio]

Dude, I'm glad I'm not the guy standing outside the ship without an environmental suit. All kidding aside, great job Vector!

 

[Vektor]

Adagio said:
Dude, I'm glad I'm not the guy standing outside the ship without an environmental suit.

That's probably why he's blue.

 

[Vektor]

Made some progress on the underside of the saucer. Still looks a little blank where the lower sensor dome will go, but it's coming along detail-wise.

 

[Titan Designer]

I love the detailing great work.

 

[Venardhi]

Vektor is bringing sexy back.

Is that a shuttle-bay tucked in there for the 'captain's yacht'? Or perhaps a backup impulse engine for use when separated?

 

[Vektor]

I haven’t been very good at responding to specific questions and comments lately so time to play catch-up.

candida said:Wouldn't those windows cut into the roof - which are beautiful - mean the running light was constantly irritatingly bleeding into the briefing room ?

Possibly. Even if it does, though, it shouldn’t be any worse than the Sovereign bridge module, which has a similar configuration. I’m not too worried about it in the grander scheme of things.

Vulcan said:Sweet work. You might want to change your copyright symbol + year down in the bottom-right corner to 2007 though.

Yeah, been meaning to do that.

Hammer said:^^^ What in blazes does Vektor mean by "triangles"?

All 3D models are composed of polygonal surfaces, each having 3 or more sides. Polygons with more than 3 sides are represented internally as groups of triangles. For example, a four-sided square actually consists of two triangles with the diagonal edge between them hidden. No matter how many sides a polygon has, it is fundamentally comprised of triangles. Generally speaking, the more triangles an object has, the longer it takes to render, which is why efficient modeling is so important; you always want to get as much detail out of as few polygons as possible. To give you an idea, the most recent renderings I posted in this thread took about four minutes each on my Pentium 4.

Paranoid Android said:Do you plan to model it [the lounge/briefing room] as well at some point?

Well, we already have a guy named NightShadow working on the bridge, but there hasn’t been a lot of coordination between he and I, so I’m not really sure what will happen with that. At the very least, I will be putting a textured “window box” behind the windows to give it a sense of depth.

Venardhi said:Is that a shuttle-bay tucked in there for the 'captain's yacht'? Or perhaps a backup impulse engine for use when separated?

Neither, actually. If you look closely, you can see the line of separation between the primary and secondary hulls, but I haven’t gotten around to cutting it through that teardrop shaped structure yet. The feature you’re talking about wouldn’t work as an impulse engine because it is actually attached to the underside of the neck and would be blasting straight at it. It’s also too small to be a shuttle bay, though it might be a good spot for a travel pod airlock. If nothing else, I will be adding some greebling in there and some more detail stretching back toward the neck.

 

[Kazeite]

Apologies if this was already debated, but, considering all those extra phaser strips and pulse phasers, those single-tube torpedo launchers look kinda... odd Personally, I'd expect launchers with double tubes from such heavily armed ship, like those on Enterprise-E.

 

[Rally_man]

Could be a quantum launch tubes. I think the E only had one of those, but double on the photon kind. But Vektor will tell you for sure.

 

[Vektor]

Kazeite said:
Apologies if this was already debated, but, considering all those extra phaser strips and pulse phasers, those single-tube torpedo launchers look kinda... odd Personally, I'd expect launchers with double tubes from such heavily armed ship, like those on Enterprise-E.

The launchers on the bottom of the saucer and below the deflector dish are both quantum torpedo launchers with single tubes. There is a twin-tube photon torpedo launcher above the deflector and there will eventually be at least one, or more likely two aft firing twin-tube launchers. There may also be additional fore and aft firing launchers on the saucer for use in separation mode.

This is a very heavily armed ship.

 

[hellsgate]

MMMMMMM. Loving this vessel. The kind of ship that elicits an evil grin, tight grip on the Captain's-Chair arm rests & a single thought --- "Heeeeeeere kitty, kitty, kitty." as a rogue Klingon Neghvar-Class heavy cruiser sits in the middle of your viewscreen.

 

[Vektor]

Progress on the planetary sensor array, or whatever the thing is supposed to be:

Note the seam that has been added across the teardrop shape on the bottom of the saucer. Also, the sensor dome assembly is not complete and not necessarily final. Thought it was worth showing, though.