Learning Blender with a Wolfhound

[Kevin Smith]

Giving her a big sister and a name. Obviously not a realistic distance apart at only 500 m.

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Learned a bit more about library objects and UV projection.

[Kevin Smith]

So I had an idea for an alternative way to model broadside bays. Instead of figuring out the hull hspe, then trying to add the bays as s displacement map, this creates the shape of the broadside flat with the bays in place, then rolls it up.

broadsidetest.png

Up sides, this doesnt require big, high res images for the displacement map. It doesn't require sub-pixel resolution sub-division of the entire hull. It allows for good sharp detail between door and frame. The doors could be made as separate objects that can be opened.

Down sides. Cant just turn off the displacement map and use it as a bump map for distant objects that don't need true relief. Doesn't work with my existing hull generator script. Requires more mesh modeling. Have to integrate the broadsides produced by the modifier stack with the rest of the hull. There may be a trick for this I'm not familiar with. As far as I can tell, bays should have a fixed height along the vertical axis rather than a fixed eight along the hull. So the flat model will have to account for this by making the bays taller as they move away from the centre line.

[John Fairbairn]

Kevin -

You are doing some remarkable work here. My respect for you ability grows apace.

Regards -

[Kevin Smith]

So I came back to this project again and managed to get the LAC bays opened up although I haven't molded the interiors of the bays. This required largely starting over so I did a Minotaur rather than a Hydra this time and roughed in some Shrike-Bs.

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[Patrick Giese]

Greetings!

I have been intrigued with the thought of doing some operational ship dev, using the UnReal engine for ship sims, perhaps starting with the lowly pinnace or LAC style before tackling something larger. So I'm out educating myself in UnReal - we may have to chat a bit given your excellent rendering demos.

[Kevin Smith]

The Minotaur model kind of ground to a halt when I tried to do the boat bays as I kept second guessing myself due to the lack of information. So I decided to do an original design for a passenger liner for a bit more flexibility.

Here's the Queen of Alsafi

forward-dorsal.png

aft-ventral.png

[Thom Shartle]

Beautiful Model! My only quibble would be to get rid of what looks like a windshield on the bridge? Given the scale they would be huge and compromise the integrity of the hull and one of it's most important locations. Plus what would there be to see?

[Kevin Smith]

Beautiful Model! My only quibble would be to get rid of what looks like a windshield on the bridge? Given the scale they would be huge and compromise the integrity of the hull and one of it's most important locations. Plus what would there be to see?

The design of the bridge is one of the areas I decided to let being evocative of real world passenger ships be an influence, inspired by the fact that the canon warship designs have a superstructure with forward facing windows that could best be described as a "false bridge" that seems to serve no functional purpose but is rather there to be evocative of a bridge and give a visual reference for "up" and "forward".

In that spirit I designed the bridge to be evocative of real world passenger ship bridges . So it has a hood extending over some of the windows as a sun shade to give an overall profile similar to real ships, but with gaps that have upward facing windows as a nod to the 3D nature of spacecraft movement, even though looking out a window is in general not useful for spacecraft navigation.

If you mean having the windows in general then yes, there isn't much to see except when in orbit but if warships can have them without structural integrity being a problem, I don't see how it would be a problem for passenger ships. If windows were a problem, the rest of the ship would have even bigger problems. As long as the inertial compensator is working, the only stress on the windows should be the weight of the artificial gravity and the bridge is comparable in size to that of a real life passenger ship that we can build without any advanced scifi materials. This has to be pressurized but

So yes, it's an affectation, but I think it's one that matches the degree to which such affectations are present in canon designs, which is what I was aiming for.

Close up attached, although it has had some changes to the structure underneath it since those last images