Pinnace – Harrington Universe

I have a few, new, Harrington universe ships in the wings I need (want) to render. They all have docking bays which, if one reads the books, typically contain one or more shuttles (pinnaces). I know of only one ‘canon’ design and do not want to go to that level of detail to accommodate a similar ship. I decided to work out a variation of a Burnelli lifting body, not to unlike the Boeing blended wing (which is a descendant of Burnelli’s work). I had numerous types but have sort of come down to three candidates.

The examples below (A, B and C) are the ones I did not delete with extreme prejudice. The type C is probably the best of the three for my purposes. It has the most volume for either passengers and or cargo. The Harrington ships mostly re-provision when at a space station so they do not need big shuttles. With cruisers and larger I will need to consider a couple of combat shuttles for landing troops though that is not the primary role of a fleet vessel. They do have them though so I have to think it out.

So –

Note: Image 1 - I have got A and C reversed (thanks Evil). Image 2 and 3 are correct.

Project Wasteland – Take 2

Some additional items that may or may not continue to exist as I move towards my clean up project.

Borg Style
While not really a Borg ship it obviously is influenced by one. I was just playing around in Wings to see if I could make something along those lines.

Home World Frigate
I used to love playing Home World and was always impressed with the number and variety in design of the ships. Here is a take on a HW Frigate design. This was a very low poly OBJ file I downloaded somewhere (I honestly forgot) and then disassembled in W3D. Then I started detailing and cleaning up the MOD level mesh to use in MAX. As far as I got.

Mash Up
When I completed my CG mesh of Chris Reyes’ Endeavor (TOS ship for SFCII) I commented on how it looked like a Jupiter 2 crossed with the Leif Erickson. With that thought, I tried to actually create just such a ship. As far as I got.

Project Wasteland – Take 1

I have been going through my copious and broadly distributed (Dropbox, old laptop, thumb drives, etc.) CG folders recently. I am attempting to consolidate my projects in one place and properly categorize them. The idea is to eliminate duplicates and abandon crap. I have lots of crap.

While I am not stating what is what in this process, I am sharing some of the ‘discoveries’ here. Feel free to comment on what you believe to be crap :). My position changes daily on some of these. The most egregious or obvious, like duplicates, will just get put into the trash. Some of the ‘one day maybe’ ideas will get put into a folder I have titled Lost Work. I hope to one day, maybe, get back to them.

Thunderbird 1
Here is an initial work up for a take on Thunderbird 1 by zenseava who is a Japanese artist that does a lot of work around Space Battleship Yamato. I’d love to one day build out a few of his designs. This is an early take and is in limbo for now.

Post TNG
I once spent a week, when time permitted, just free forming ideas in Wings 3D. They were mostly Star Trek designs. A few where ideas on ‘future’ ships we might see after TNG. Here is my ‘Ironing Board’ design idea.

More to come….

More Harrington ships

So little time, so much I want to do, no ability to stay on point.

Yes, I have modelling ADD. Really.

With that said, I have done more work on my Harrington novels fleet. I have a ‘generic’ destroyer 98% done and mostly textured. Adding to that I have finished the basic work on a cruiser and a battle cruiser. Again, to avoid the wrath of H.H. purists, I am avoiding trying to recreate specific classes in the novels. As far as I am concerned canon went out the door with the Weber approved game and movie.

I have fixed some issues I had in scale on all the various precursors to these ships. I actually created all the various types in a single file to correct scale sans the details.

Anyhow:
Battle Cruiser

Hard to see but this second image shows the various missile ports. You have to know that these are big ships as they carry a large number of missiles (primary ship to ship weaponry).

Cruiser

Lots of smoothing work and object cloning left to do before I can ‘paint’ ‘em.

A humorous pause

Pay attention.

Look before you leap.

Aside from all the other reasons I generally post for being under productive; I just got back from spending Thanksgiving holiday with family out in Maryland. It’s been a few years since I have been out that way (first time with family as a daughter and her husband only just moved a year ago). We planned big and went to a fair number of great places. To end the trip we all decided to spend the day at the National Mall. For those who do not know what that is, the National Mall is in DC and is where we have many of our major monuments in the US.

We hit all the open exhibits (memorials) and then we each picked a specific museum we wanted to ‘absorb’. If you have been you know that it takes hours if not days to really enjoy any one of the museums. Of course I picked the Air and Space museum. I have been but cannot get enough of it. And to end the day, I purposefully waited to the last to go down to the basement gift shop to see THE USS Enterprise! I’d had to skip it last time as I ran out of time. They have it stuffed in the downstairs gift shop way in the back.

So, when everyone checked in that they were ready to regroup I headed for the gift shop. Went down to the basement and, giddily, fast walked to the back. (You can see the case from the escalator! Joy!)

And..Oh my..I’m so excited..Wait!.. WTF!?

Yeah, I probably should have known.

On the good side, when it comes back it will be out where it belongs for everyone to see. Also noted, since I was last there they updated the floor display map icon for where it is located. The icon is for the ‘Enterprise’ Enterprise! Really? Really. I hope they fix that.

Starbase. Or, one thing leads to another.

I have so many things to finish and so little time to do anything other than work. So, of course, I started another project! I have been doing some renders of old stuff and minor re-tweaks of even older items. I wanted a basic space station I could use as a backdrop in a few scenes but one of my own design. Nothing to elaborate or time consuming to create or texture. Not a showpiece.

I also thought it should fit in a number of different universes (Trek, Harrington, etc.).

Here is what I have after 2-3 hours which is all I was able to squirrel away in the last week. Obviously about 90% plus was put into the textures. All I have done is the diffuse maps and illumination masks. Need specular maps and bump (yep, good ole Max v4.2 – uses bump). The center ‘ring’ is still a coalescing thought so is rather ‘plain’.

Storm below

I don’t typically do what lead to the attached render. I entered a contest for Trek inspired artwork on a site (nameless) that asked for the entries to be 100% made by the contestants. The details are not important but I thought I would participate for the fun of it. I understood the request to be for ‘original work’ and inspired by Trek. Something along the lines of ‘lesser known ships’. I have a few of those laying about and are all my own design.

I have my USS McDevitt and wanted to create a second image of it for some time. I thought this would be fun and a motivator to get that image done. I have some nice (and almost everyone has seen) NASA hi-res on orbit images that would just look great with star ships in them. A few hours later (well 6 with render time for the passes and the post editing) I had this.

Don’t ask about the contest.

Honorverse Redux – Part 6

Another basic update to end the week. I completed the major textures along with bump and specular mapping. The render here is just that done to see how it looks. Moving on to the minor parts and then see how easily I can replicate the work to finish the cruiser that goes along with this.