USS Midnight

[Darkwing]

Over the past week I've been working on a model for a friend to go in his Star Trek fan series, Red Squad. Anyways, I'm at the texturing stage now and figured I'd post what I have.

 

 

I've beveled everything and for the most part, it's actually all one piece, at least the main hull, saucer and nacelles are.

[TheSpleen]

nice work

[HomeSlice]

Nice! You are getting much better at modeling. Isn't it a good feeling when you can make your own models and be proud of them?

[Darkwing]

Thanks and yes I have improved over the last like 4 years, so at least something's come of it Still some rough spots but you'll probably only find them if you're really looking. Anyways, here's a new pic, playing around with ambient decals and lights

 

[Darkwing]

Time for a new pic. More decaling

 

[pengwin]

I love this model.

I've just started work on a version based on the original Constitution Class Enterprise, but, unfortunately, my time is limited, so it may be a while before I get enough done for posting WIP images.

[jason1025]

Take it to the next level and create animated materials for the warp engines.

[Darkwing]

I intend to Jason. They're simple turbulence materials so animating them isn't that difficult. Ship's also gonna have the blinking lights on it to

[PurpleDingo]

Really nice looking ship, man. I have some new images of mine I need to post.

 

One little critique....I'd tone down the glow on the nacelles a little.

 

Keep it up!

[Darkwing]

be more specific, glow or ambience? Cause I've brought the glow down quite a ways but have actually increased the ambience. I like brighter nacelles, but I know they're not that bright in normal Star Trek. Course I do have the power of it being fan made on my side But yeah, nacelles need more work anyways, they're not quite done, but unfortunately the batteries in my mouse died and I haven't any replacements yet, so I gotta get more batteries to work on this (and other things) cause a track pad just doesn't cut it

[Rodney]

Really nice!

 

Great modeling. Those ambient decals and lights really sell it in the details.

[PurpleDingo]

Looking it over again, I believe I meant amibiance. It is a cool look, though.

[Darkwing]

How's this? Brighter, dimmer, bluer, don't change?

 

[Meowx]

While I'm not a big enough Star Trek nut to know exactly what class of ship that is, it seems pretty glowy when compared to, say, the Enterprise-E:

 

Looks like there's also some detail breaking up monotony of one having big glowy engine:

[Darkwing]

Yeah, there are actually details on my nacelles, but they are washed out by the ambience and whatnot. As for what type of ship, it's my own design

[Meowx]

Awesome! It's very well designed for an original ship; fits right in line with the rest of the Federation.

[Darkwing]

Thanks! And now I have batteries for my mouse again, I've been working some more on Midnight

 

[Darkwing]

Got a bit more done on the underside today. I must say, I do and always have loved AM's decal system

 

[TheSpleen]

very nice work

[Darkwing]

Thank ye kindly. Here's another image!!

 

[Darkwing]

Here's a quick wireframe of the model

 

[NancyGormezano]

Really very, very nice. And I don't usually like space ships!

 

I have to ask. Why so many splines on the .... ummm... long blue thingies? Everything else looks so economical, spline wise.

 

EDIT: I just looked at your reference photos, so now I understand about the splines. I suspect you might have been able to get similar effect with a cylindrically mapped decal with large # of repeats. Looks good!

Edited October 16, 2010 by NancyGormezano

[Darkwing]

Because the nacelles are made up of a bunch of cylinders to create this kind of bumpy shape thing. It's a bit of a trick I learned from studying one of Al's models a while ago

[Darkwing]

Oh and the mesh could probably be even less dense than it is now. The original mesh had a lot of splines, but at the time it was going to be exported for Max and I've learned a denser mesh has a more accurate export, however, texturing proved to be a problem in Max and so it was decided to keep the model in AM and so I removed a bunch of splines, but there's still more that probably could be removed

[NancyGormezano]

Ah Ha!

 

(I just edited my previous post)

[Darkwing]

Seems I've forgotten to update this thread! The model is nearing its completion as there's not much left to texture or light on this ship. These pics are not in order of completion

 

[HomeSlice]

This just keeps getting better and better. Way to go Darkwing!

[Darkwing]

Believe it or not, pretty much all of the textures were created by a free vector program called Inkscape. I only used Photoshop for 2 elements I think

[Darkwing]

Ok I need help with a problem. I'm making shields for the ship and I want the shields to retain the shape of the ship. Naturally, the shields have to be slightly larger than the ship, or thicker rather. Scaling isn't really an option because the scale uses a pivot point and so everything goes out in the same direction as opposed to it's individual direction. Doing it manually I tried and got angry with. I thought of another solution that woulda worked in a poly program and that was extruding the entire model. I forgot that the extrusion doesn't make things larger, just makes it pop out in a certain direction. Anybody got any ideas on making a model thicker?

[John Bigboote]

Dang! Slick lookin ship! I'd like to see you pout it over a starfield or spacey background to help it 'pop'...

[Darkwing]

I'm already there, just waiting on somebody so I can do a public release of the completed model. I'm just having this shields problem of making the model thicker as in bigger but not on one central pivot

[Darkwing]

Well, while the power was out I managed to figure out a way so now I have shields!

[Darkwing]

At long last, I am able to present to you, the USS Midnight, NCC-89520!

 

[HomeSlice]

Great pics

[Darkwing]

Thanks, I have another one coming but it takes 10 minutes per pass to render and it's a 9 pass image. But there's this funny magenta bar at the top which is odd

[new guy]

slick man... very slick!

[Darkwing]

Thanks. And now, some shield effects and shields of this style are very difficult to execute, so animating it's gonna be a pain!

 

[animas3D]

Dude, that is awesome!!! Star Trek Lives!

[Darkwing]

 

It's pretty cool too, all these combat effects can be done in AM and they look very sharp if you ask me. My biggest complaint is that I'm doing everything on a laptop and that previous pic took 2 hours to render, so rendering when it comes to animation time is gonna be a killer!

[John Bigboote]

Beam me up!

 

Looking fantastic... love to see you try animating this. I forgot to tell you if you go to NASA they have some fantastic backdrops for you.

[Darkwing]

Yeah, this ship was actually built for someone else, it wasn't a just for kicks model. It's gonna be for a friend's fan star trek series (He already has 2 episodes released) and this ship shows up in episode 4 or something like that. So yeah, this sucker's gonna be animated, in fact, I'll be starting test renders soon, but if all goes well, he'll purchase AM and do the animating, cause dammit, I'm a modeler, not an animator Jim But I'll be doing the compositing cause all of the other models and things are done in 3DS Max and seeing as the conversion in either direction doesn't go well, we'll be animating Midnight in AM and everything else in Max and compositing it all together Lots of work ahead! But I can't let it take away from my serial that I'm doing

[animas3D]

That is so cool. I love the detail of the textures on the ships. Good use of bump maps (not displacement, right?)

 

Are my eyes deceiving me or do the luminance maps cast light. I mean on the image below, the windows actually seem to be casting light (circled in red).

 

 

I wasn't aware that you could set image maps to cast light onto other surfaces. Is that a radiosity thing?

 

Man, that's nice.

 

Just a few suggestions.

 

- I think that the glow around the laser main laser being shot at the midnight can be a little thinner.

- Maybe tone down the glow on the warp engines as well. Or maybe just put them on the top. By the way, this is the kind of thing you might want to consider doing in compositing where you would have better control. If it's in the render you cant change them. Right now those glows seem a bit too pronounced for my taste.

- On the other hand I think that the green lights on the space ship in the center could use some glow since they are too crisp.

 

By the way is that image straight out of the renderer or did you do some post processing?

 

Keep up the good work.

[largento]

Great job!

 

I've started a re-watch of ST:TNG. I'm just now starting the 2nd season. Many of these I haven't seen since they were originally broadcast. Anyway, they were discussing some of the visual effects in the extras for the first season and mentioned that the shield effect was done optically by turning the camera sideways and dropping salt onto a black sphere on a black background. :-)

[Darkwing]

That is so cool. I love the detail of the textures on the ships. Good use of bump maps (not displacement, right?)

 

Are my eyes deceiving me or do the luminance maps cast light. I mean on the image below, the windows actually seem to be casting light (circled in red).

 

 

I wasn't aware that you could set image maps to cast light onto other surfaces. Is that a radiosity thing?

 

Man, that's nice.

 

Just a few suggestions.

 

- I think that the glow around the laser main laser being shot at the midnight can be a little thinner.

- Maybe tone down the glow on the warp engines as well. Or maybe just put them on the top. By the way, this is the kind of thing you might want to consider doing in compositing where you would have better control. If it's in the render you cant change them. Right now those glows seem a bit too pronounced for my taste.

- On the other hand I think that the green lights on the space ship in the center could use some glow since they are too crisp.

 

By the way is that image straight out of the renderer or did you do some post processing?

 

Keep up the good work.

 

 

What's going on is I have a light casting over the Registry and so it goes just a bit further lighting up that raise in the hull . There's no displacement, just bump. The image was assembled in Gimp (gag) using I believe four layers. This image is actually messed up cause what happened was the two romulan ships were rotos, but I didn't realize one didn't have an alpha on it (there went 2 hours of rendering out the window). So I re-rendered without the ships and I rendered Midnight with the weapon effects. Now they were rendered with an alpha, but lens flares and glows don't render in alpha (bye bye two more hours). So what I did then was rendered on a black background with no alpha, the lens flares and phaser glow, however, I forgot about the disruptor pulses because the glow for those were on a different layer that got covered over by some other layer. So yeah, this was a trial and error test that has taught some valuable lessons for the future.

 

Now as for glow sizes, I've been sticking to about a size of 6 or 7 and an intensity of 125% which I like. However, the AM glow isn't controllable for isolated objects, so the thin phaser beam gets the same thickness of a glow as everything else. As for doing it in Post, I have no idea how to do that. The phasers might be easier cause I could render them as a separate layer and give a gaussian blur or something in FCE, simulating their glows. But as for doing independent glows on the bridge and warp nacelles, no idea

[Darkwing]

For kicks, here's each layer:

 

[animas3D]

That's cool, thanks for giving insight into your process. Good work. Compositing is something that you should definately learn since it's better to do effects there as much as possible. There is a glow effect in After Effects that does a pretty good job of making lights glow and other things like lasers.

 

Still, are the bright windows casting a bit of light on the raise in the hull, or did you paint that illumination in gimp? I'm taking about how the light cast on the raise in the hull seems to get brighter near the windows (circled in red in the above image). I mean, I assume you applied the lit up windows with an image map. I saw a demo recently for a 3D program where they were able to use a texture map to actually cast light in the scene. I don't think you can do this in A:M, but I might be mistaken. Maybe you know of a way?

[Darkwing]

Nope, it's just the registry light (which is a Klieg) that is hitting it. It's just the angle of the light I would assume that's giving that illusion. And I do not have After Effects. I'm limited to the capabilities of AM's post and FCE's post

[Darkwing]

On further review, I know why those spots are brighter and it's a bit of a coincidence thing. See the hull texture also has a specular intensity map applied. So certain hull plates are brighter than others and that looks like what's going on there, is the specular is more on those plates and so when the registry light hits it, it appears brighter than the others

[animas3D]

Aha, I see. Okay. A coincidence that happened to work for you.

[Darkwing]

Indeed and those happen fairly frequently in my works, especially editing, so I'm getting cocky enough to call it skill/talent