Star Trek ship USS Vincennes WIP

Hello everyone,
I’ve been mucking around with Blender again lately and have reached the limit of my self taught skills so I thought I’d post my WIPs up here so I can get some advice on how to do some of the more technical things on my ship.

The ship is a Merced Class starship, a smaller frigate or light cruiser sized ship. I didn’t like the nacelles that were on the reference I had, so I used the Excelsior class nacelles as a base and made a few changes, chief among them shrinking them down.

Right now, I’m stuck on trying to carve holes in the hull for windows without the smoothing or sub-surf modifier going wonky, and fooling around with lighting in Cycles.

Anyway, here’s the pics. Constructive criticism is always welcome.

Oh, and I’ve been working on it for about 3 weeks.
The background in the renders is a pano rendered from Adriano’s excellent Earth in Cycles setup.

Thanks,
Joe

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Hi there! I’d say it looks pretty good. The only criticisms I really have of it is that the material isn’t shiny enough and the lighting isn’t harsh enough. Even painted metal has some shine to it, even more so in space where light is very direct.

As for the windows, it really depends on how many poly’s you want to spend on it and what style you want. I generally do this one of two ways:

  1. Model up a window with a frame and position where I want it on the hull. Then, on the main model, use the knife tool (k) to cut out a space for the window. Just make sure that you’re cutting inside the window frame and you don’t make triangles or n-gons without fixing them after you’re done. Then, since you’re using the subsurf modifier, you’ll probably either have to put a second edge loop there or adjust the edge sharpness using “Edge Crease” so that the added geometry stays hidden by the window frame. Then, after you’ve finished modeling and applied the subsurf modifier, join those window models to the main mesh. (Pro tip: it helps to unwrap sub-objects like windows before duplicating, saves work when uv-unwrapping later on. Using linked duplicates helps with this too).

  2. If you want something that exactly conforms to the hull and doesn’t have a frame, you can use the “Inset Faces” tool to give you an edge loop that you can shape into your window. When adjusting this shape, use “Vertex Slide” as that will help keep the vertex’s from messing up the surrounding face’s normals. Then, when you’re done, select the faces of the window and extrude inward a good ways. These faces will have a curve to them because they were originally part of the outer hull. To fix this, you can orient your view to as side-on as possible, and use the Knife tool with the “Cut Through” option enabled to cut an edge loop in the side-wall of the window (hide geometry that might be accidentally cut). The line you cut should be parallel to the window and perpendicular to the edges of the sidewall. Then delete the inner faces, select the edge loop you just cut, extrude, scale in, fill, and you have a nice flat window. You’ll probably have to either add edge loops or adjust the Edge Crease value to give you sharp edges around the window. You might also have to move the window to get it back closer to the surface; do this by changing your Transform Orientation to Normal with those faces selected and move it to where you want it. Sounds more complicated than it is, but it should work for ya.

Hope, I was clear! Good luck and keep at it =)

Thanks, I’m still working on learning nodes on the materials and lighting. Any advice on how to set up a better lighting rig is welcomed. If you notice, there are three different materials on the saucer that I’m experimenting with. The aqua color is pretty shiny with a technically functioning bump map aztec pattern on it, but I’m not happy with it. The white hull material only has a diffuse shader and the light gray has a glossy and diffuse with a mix shader in it but I can’t see much of a difference between the two as far as reflectivity goes.

I think I’ve made a decent attempt at windows last night, but of course, forgot to push them up to my webspace… I’ll put them up after work.

Thanks for the help,
Joe

Well, a space lighting setup that I’ve been playing with is pretty simple. A single small sphere with an extremely bright emission material on it (I have it at 1000 strength), then a larger object with another much weaker emission material to give low levels of diffuse light. Then add in other emitters for things like planets. It really depends on your scene as to what you do =)

Played around with it again last night and added geometry. I think I am mostly happy with it. Is there an easier way to do it than this?

http://hmsenterprise.no-ip.biz/images/WIP49.png

http://hmsenterprise.no-ip.biz/images/WIPRender18.png

no, that is the correct way. unless you want to ruin your topology with Booleans.

Is there any way to keep the smooth curve under the front of the oval window instead of the way it is pinched there due to the extra geometry?

Thanks,
Joe

Got tired of messing with window geometry, so I decided to work on detailing out the impulse deck better. Need to do some work on the glows and such inside, but I’m fairly happy with the results so far.

I need to figure out materials settings as well to make the area around the blue dome more reflective so it catches the blue better, but other than that, I’m really happy with today’s progress.

http://hmsenterprise.no-ip.biz/images/WIPRender19.png

http://hmsenterprise.no-ip.biz/images/WIPRender20.png