Great looking ship
WIP: U.S.S. Bozeman revisited--aka Unused TSFS Ship Design.
- Thread starter Gepard
- Start date
ST-One
Vice Admiral
ST-One
Vice Admiral
This is a lovely design, and beautifully modelled. Wish I had a fraction of the skill and talent to do that.
Every time I see an update on this ship, I love it more and more. Fantastic work... I always look forward to more! 
A suggestion then, in this case... and it's one that actually makes a reasonable amount of sense, both artistically and technically.
Think about the windows on, say, your car. They have a rubber gasket running around the outside. Take that away (or make the gasket "body-colored") and it just looks wrong... fake. (this is one of the tricks for car models that most people miss.)
Now... both to represent "gasketing" and also to provide a bit of protection against glare (for those inside the ship looking out) from the windowframe edges, I'd think that the windowframes might actually be in a darker color... perhaps a graphite, or even just flat black, tone.
Now, if that's the case... the global illumination won't "wash out" the darker area so much... and the contrast with the hull-proper coloration will be sufficient to make the window-frame edges visible. And since the amount of frame seen from angles will vary, obviously, this will give you your 3D-inset effect that you're losing, without having to give up the benefits of global (which you really need to get the thing to look right, given the various lamps and so forth being built into the model).
Just a suggestion... it's what's done with REAL spacecraft and aircraft, and it'll solve your "faux 2D" issue.
I've always wanted to try Glare paint on Trek windowsills. Heck, I'm surprised TMP didn't do it, considering how much it aped 2001 (and that it's a standard NASA practice.) 
Very nice... I had been assuming that your "defense field rings" on the edge of the p-hull were textures... I, also, tend to do as much as possible with geometry, so I can appreciate this approach.
The window-frames look just about perfect by the way. I might make the "glass" a bit deeper, overall... these look to be only a couple of inches inset, and I'd probably go for something like a 6" inset if it were me. But this is closer to what you'd probably have on the TMP filming model (where the window-rims are actually just paint-mask edges!) so this is probably more "accurate."
Very cool!
But are the windows really supposed to be that large? The smaller ones look like they are 6ft in diameter...
But are the windows really supposed to be that large? The smaller ones look like they are 6ft in diameter...
Yeah, that's pretty much how big they were on the Enterprise miniature--the tops and bottoms touched the deco lines running 'round the saucer. That would make them very, very large. (It's worth noting that the Reliant and Excelsior miniatures reduced the sizes of the windows, but I like the larger look better, even if it poses some scale issues.)
retrotrekker
Ensign
Interesting! You've combined several different concepts, yet followed the same lines, very nice.
Lovely design. I just wish that the model had a different name and registry number. Can you come up with a different name and registry for the model? Please!
I, like Brannon Braga, was born in Bozeman, Montana. I'm quite pleased with the name as-is.
