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3D Enterprise Starship I'm working on (update)
halkun
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Whee, I've picked up this project after putting it on hold for a while. Pictures follow...
All the way to deck 3 (I'm working on the 4th deck now. only 38 left to go)
X-Ray view
Lots and lots of windows... (You can see the insides!)
All the way to deck 3 (I'm working on the 4th deck now. only 38 left to go)
X-Ray view
Lots and lots of windows... (You can see the insides!)
halkun on
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The plans are freely downloadable. They were done by Ed Whitefire under the supervision of Andrew Probert. Probert was the original designer of the Enterprise-D. Whitefire made the deck plans for a book that was going to be published, but the publisher lost the license and Mike Okuda took over as art directer for the series proper. After a while the "Official" plans were done by Okuda and published as 24 fold-out poster blueprints. I own those too, but I like Whitefire's better. Firstly because they are already scanned, but mostly because it's how the original insides are supposed to go. Also many the rooms are "blank" which leaves more to the imagination.
You can download the Whitefire plans here...
I'm most likely not going to be calling it the "Enterprise". I may make it the U.S.S. Galaxy (NCC-1700) in tradition that it's the original, or my own number (NCC-1683) and probably call it the "Whitefire"
Some things that are interesting:
The ship is 1:1, and I found out that the insides, for the most part, are quite consistent in scale. The only real issue is that the real external size of the ship verses the published sizes are incorrect. I'm nudging around the skin of the ship and the placement of windows to better reflect what's inside. Also, because the skin is angular, there are a few more vaulted overheads (ceilings) that I took for granted.
By the way, here's the actual size of the ship
Published dimensions:
length: 842.5 meters
beam : 487 meters
depth : 137 meters
Real world dimensions
length : 1048.41 meters (a kilometer!)
beam : 738 meters(!)
Depth : 238 meters
Here's some pictures of the deck plans semi-transparent and layered on top of each other (Ever wanted to see a ghost ship?)
I'm fleshing out Hanger Bay 1, (deck 4) which also has the top phaser ring around it. Inside hangar bay 1 there is a building that is used as a "control tower" (It's quite roomy in there) It's a shame you never saw it in the TV show or the movies.
Hangar Bay 1 Control tower (floor not added yet)
Sketchup is designed for architectural modeling. It a lot like if 3D Studio max got drunk, and had a really dirty one-night stand with some landscaping software. While in the middle fo this, Autocad comes come from work, and walks right into the middle of it. After joining in, calls up Maya to come over and gets Blender to hold the camera...
Sketchup is the resulting love child that comes out 9 months later.
Here are some tutorials to get you started.
It's really stupid-simple to use, but is missing a lot of features of that full blown modeling package has. (This can be gotten around with plugins). For example, there is no sphere primitive, and you can't make a oval line segment. (Only circle parts and lines). This can be gotten around with some tricks, but it's a bit conter intuitive.
I'm treating the ship as one huge building, and it's really easy to trace out floor plans and extrude them into 3D space deck by deck. It's still tedious work.
Here's hangar bay one with the floor and control tower. I still have to extrude the rooms. The ring on the outer edge of deck 4 is the phaser bank.
I also have the turboshafts as a separate layer, here is the turbolift network I have so far.
If you plan on making a career out of this I would strongly suggest doing it in another program like maya or max though. Keep posting the progress. Very keen on seeing this come together. Also what full rendered view looks like
I remember about a decade ago there were plans to release an Enterprise "Interactive Technical Manual" which was basically a giant 3D render of the ship you would walk about in, FPS style, and could interact with things.
It got cancelled at the 11th hour. =\
Well, it is if you want to pay $500 for the Pro version. Using a Sketchup->MAX/Maya workflow isn't necessarily bad, because Sketchup does have a bit of a speed advantage for certain things (though I've never done it myself, maybe the exporters are crap or something, haha).
But yeah, if this is a career-building project and not just a 'for fun' project, you'll probably want to get the model into something with a real renderer at some point.
Twitter
Makes sense, keep up the good work.
http://twitter.com/straightfacing
tons of work
you have some patience.
(Also awesome)
No way dude. I totally bought it. It was bundled in with a game called Star Trek: BORG! or something. The guy who played Q was in it, starring as some character called 'Cue'! But I couldn't get the borg thing to work on my PC, it flat out refused for random reasons, as was the style at the time. Assholes wouldnt let me return it either.
The tech manual thing would crash constantly so I didn't get to use it as much as I wanted, but you could visit a bunch of places on the ship, and take a virtual 'walk' from place to place (ie, it played the appropriate quicktime video in a tiny window straight from the CD-ROM). You could click on hotspots as you looked around places (it had those 360 VR google maps street view style images to navigate), and they'd bring up a little box of info about things, or move you to another spot in the 'department' you were in.
It was awful, though I did enjoy the ambient enterprise noises.
In my model, You can walk around on the ship, and the turboshafts are hollow. One of the things I often do is walk about on the deck I've made and paint the surfaces I've missed. Also the ceilings are painted transparent on the top so you can see in, and colored inside so you can't see out.
When I'm done I was thinking of doing a few things...
1) "rent" each room for a buck, and whoever gets the room can furnish it how they want, then I can import the room back into the model. (There might be a slight problem with that)
2) Release the whole model that others can convert it into new formats using the Pro version or any of the Sketchup plugins.
The ship is by far not perfect. One of the things someone is going to need to do is weld together the vertexes to a centimeter resolution. There are probably a lot of extra faces that could be merged. The normals are also all double-sided. The second thing is that I have no dynamic objects in my model either. This means no doors or turbolift cars. The doors are all exactly the same size and an open door object often is placed there, so an enterprising person can change all the doors to ones that work, use them as portal markers, or do what have you. This way you are not manually changing a few thousand doors throughout the ship.
It would be kind of cool to see an Unreal or Quake level be made out of this, but this ship is HUEG!!! You could probably run around with 32 people and either not see anyone or just get completely lost! Also, because of the size, textures are kept to a minimum.
Apart from that this is amazing! I would love a trek game where i can just roam around the ship at free will. Interact with the crew and muck about with systems etc.
Please, convert and make!