KJCs Work

[Jetfreak]

Yep, definitely shaping up great, more headaches inbound when you get to the stardrive windows lol

 

[Hellkite]

Just remember in the coming days




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[kjc733]

What do you mean, this is the future. I'm going to replace all of the windows with holographic viewscreens
But yeah, the geometry does not lend itself to texturing. I've never been a fan of the Galaxy and this is not helping!

 

[Hath]

Hi kjc733. I like your "mono" phaser array. I would do the same to the aft "eye brow" ones too

Have you thought about make the arrays on the pylons and warp nacelles pulse phasers?

 

[kjc733]

I'm not a fan of the aft arrays but making the upper ones a single array would interfere with the aft torpedo launcher. I also prefer to keep the upper and lower the same.
No plans for pulse phasers. The Galaxy is a lumbering beast so fixed arrays are silly and arrays are more flexible than turrets (pun not intended). The Galaxy array layout provides good 360 phaser coverage. Look at a Galaxy from nay angle, if you can see part of an array you can be hit by a phaser beam. You would need a lot of turrets to replicate that coverage.
I've made a few tweaks based on the pylon change and aesthetics for the nacelles (pushing the mount further back adds a little "weight" to the rear and reduces the sense of design imbalance).

In my opinion a lot of though went in to the original Galaxy phaser placement. More so than on Voyager, which is why I made more changes to the arrays on that redesign.

 

[kjc733]

I have news!!!
I have finally managed to regain use of Maya on my new(er) PC, which means I no longer need to do graphics work on my WinXP Pentium 4
So, 4K Renders here we come!!!

BUT...
Maya 2019 file formats seem to be sightly different to Maya 5, so some assembly is required (which is what I've been learning the last week). Took some experimentation to get anything to show up.
Also, Autodesk at some point moved away from Mental Ray and moved over to Arnold (never heard of it). Which sometimes throws a wobbly when it detects MR nodes in my existing scenes. So far I've not managed to get Arnold to render anything, however Maya 2019s own software renderer seems better than that in v5. The h/w render seems total garbage though, it garbled my Intrepid mesh quite spectacularly.

SOooooo...
Hopefully bigger and better pictures in the future. But it's going to take a bit of time to get a handle on the mew software (assuming it doesn't get killed by a Win10 update like last time).

 

[Hath]

Good point about a mono phaser array blocking the aft torpedo launcher. As a side note do you plan on going with a dual aft torpedo launcher? If the mono array is out how about making both eye brows longer by way of increasing their length up the pylons?

I didn't mean for you to add pulse cannons to the pylons, sorry for not making myself clear, I just thought you could make the pylon and nacelle arrays "pulse firing".

Another phaser question have you thought about how many segments you want in each phaser array? What I'm driving at is since it has been a few years since the galaxy class first rolled off the production line phaser technology should have improved. As such each phase array segment should be able to generate more power so less segments are needed. With this philosophy you could make all of the phaser arrays the same length and they would have the same amount of phaser power output.
(The galaxy class's main phaser array was made up of 200 emitter segments that put out 5.1 MW of power for a combined output of 1020 MW. By comparison that would make a "eye brow" array have a total output of only 15.3 MW.) You could used your new "mono brow" array as the standard length. Cut the main arrays on the saucer in half (as in two arrays) and that would about do it.

Anyways hope these ideas are at least some use in the inspiration department. Its still your ship and I hope I don't come off as trying to push my ideas on you. Just excited about your project! Can we get new updated pics please

 

[kjc733]

Nope, just a single aft launcher. I don't want to widen the spine any further.

I can honestly say that I haven't given the number of segments in any array any thought whatsoever.

When I do these ships there are a handful of things that are important to me:
1. Any changes have to make sense (aka no tacking on warp nacelles just because I can).
2. I must maintain the character of the design. A Galaxy needs to remain recognisable as a Galaxy. This is done by holding on to the prominent characteristics, the general shape and any unique elements.
3. I'm trying to give it a notably different style that either "fixes" the original design, modernises it, or makes it look better (all of which are subjective).

The small arrays (which I don't like) serve an aesthetic purpose in emphasising the size of the Galaxy. Which is why they look silly on the much smaller Intrepid. I see them as the prominent freckle on the Galaxy. This is why I'm unsure about the "monobrow" array, it subtracts from the character but makes sense - as you say bigger = more powerful.

Anyway, as I stated, I've been focusing on getting new software to work. Image A shows the sort of anomaly that appears when using the hardware render - unfortunately this occurs in the normal mesh editing mode as well.

Image C shows some texture changes to the underside. This is the only real update.

 

[Jetfreak]

The second pic really shows off the smoother transition from pylons to drive. Hints of the Ambassador proto in there too.

Also, on the technical side of things, have you tried scaling down the mesh to half or quarter of its size now. I had similar issues in Max where a model imports 20x bigger than the default size and it shows me the same ripple effect when I zoom out.

 

[kjc733]

Jetfreak - I noticed late yesterday that everything had been massively scaled up when I tried another export to milkshape, so reducing the size (and I think it's more a factor of 100 or 1000!) is something I need to look in to. I'll need to be careful about it though as I'm not sure if the coordinate system has also been reset... which means that when the individual parts are reset they may not align.

I've also been thinking about the hints of the proto Ambassador - I'm not sure if that's good or bad given this is supposed to be an updated Galaxy...

Hmmm, just noticed that the screengrab on the new PC is smaller than the one on the old PC, yet they both go to the same monitor. Bizarre.

 

[Jetfreak]

Holy crap that is spooky on the screencap pictures, they should line up if its 1920x1080!

Yeah, it's something I noticed on the drive section but I wouldn't sweat on it much. The curvy, ovoid shapes are really a trademark of the Probert design style to some similarities are expected.

I know the struggle with coordinate scaling, one of my own headaches was reconstructing misaligned meshes from FleetAdmiral's STO game rips - nightmare fuel all around lol

 

[Majestic]

KJC you've done wonders again. This is a awesome Galaxy Refit. Something that I'd hope we'd see on screen in Picard but sadly never got.

Loving this more and more.

 

[Terra_Inc]

This is fantastic work, KJC! I'm really looking forward to seeing more of this!

 

[kjc733]

Finally finished rescaling it, my first round was a factor of ten, but it wasn't small enough so now it's 1/100th. It seems to like that better, but for some reason nothing shows when I change to a default plan or side view camera. But they work if I'm in the segmented view... to err is human but to really foul something up requires a computer.
In the meantime I've made a few additions to the textures on the lower saucer.

 

[Majestic]

My she's beautiful.

 

[kjc733]

Some fiddling with glow maps and rendering. Still can't get Arnold to work (I'll need to find a user guide) so these were taken with the basic Maya software package. The render window is going to be a pain to work with, for some reason it is brighter and washed out compared to the final image (which is why they are so dark).
It also looks like I'll need to do something about the window cutouts on the lower saucer...

 

[K_merse]

Looks beautiful, I really like how it looks from under.

 

[kjc733]

No updates, I've been playing with my new Maya, it's just different enough to be irritating.
Recently I was asked about what the seaQuest would look like with a shadow skin... something like this.

 

[Chiletrek]

Hello:
I hope the learning curve will go mush swifter soon! Also, that SeaQuest ship actually looks like a plausible Shadow ship .

 

[kjc733]

Yeah, sometimes I give myself nightmares...

 

[Chiletrek]

Hello:
Some nightmares are worth to get something cool, right?

Very nice work! To keep that pattern of texture consisten must have been a pain.

 

[kjc733]

To keep that pattern of texture consisten must have been a pain.

That's the secret of complex patterned skins - it really isn't
In fact, no effort went in to adding the spikes, I just needed to make sure they were scaled the same.
With clean textures or regular patterns it is easy to see when things don't line up. But with complex and seemingly random patterns it is hard to notice any breaks unless you go looking for them.
When I was originally mapping my first UEO design it literally kept me awake at night trying to figure out how to align seams so as to be invisible. But if you put the seam in a natural crease/join in the mesh, the texture mismatch is all but invisible.
I imagine if the overlaying cell pattern had been bigger it would have become more apparent, but even at this level it seems fine.

 

[Chiletrek]

Hello:
It sounds like it went very smoothlu then! .

I think we need to be extra careful only if a mismatch became too evident or if the models are meant to be seen for very close-up shots. Otherwise I agree it shouldn't be a problem at all!

 

[kjc733]

Something I desperately want to add to my growing fleet of miniatures is a (B5) Victory class. I found this gorgeous model on Thingyverse and tried to upload it to Shapeways (first time I've done that, honest) but the site had a meltdown. To be fair it's 663564 polygons and has tonnes of detail that will never print. At first I thought I'd be able to poly reduce it, but it took about 5 mins of looking at the mesh to realise nope.
Leaving one option... build my own. This one is 35286 polygons and has been designed from the ground up for printing. With a little luck there will be photos in my other thread... soon... just need to plan the supports

And yes, I said 663,564 polygons. Actually at one point I accidentally duplicated it so I had two on screen at once. With the new s/w on the new h/w I am no longer limited to less that 100k

 

[Hellkite]

With a resin printer you should get good details it kind of what they are known for

 

[kjc733]

True enough, but its the level of detail that I struggle to see on a 32" screen, so I doubt I'll see it on a 9cm print
As it is, I'm finding some of the detail I added is smaller than the support tips.

 

[Majestic]

The Victory was always a beautiful ship and you're model is outstanding mate.

 

[kjc733]

May - it's almost a zombie thread!
As you all know I've been focused on my 3D printing and the Resolution. Now the cat is out of the bag over on Discord here are a few shots of something Jetfreak asked me to work on.
I know I keep on saying this, but the design turned out to be a lot more complex than either myself or Jetfreak gave credit (it's almost like the show designers didn't want anyone making low poly models ), that said I'm anticipating she'll be about 4.5k which I'm sure will please some people round here.
The textures are of course by Jetfreak.

 

[CptBenSisko]

dude, that little ship is really growing on me after two seasons of Lower Decks.. i thought id watch a few episodes and never watch any more.. but now i cant wait for season 3!! As for the California Class, she looks amazing KJC!! Im glad you put the registry where it belongs though.. looks out of place not having a registry on the front top/bottom... great work!! This will def be going into my TNG mod!

 

[Majestic]

Awesome work as always mate. Will be awsome to see her in-game