2021 (1)

Sad my first post of 2021 is to note the passing of Mira Furlan.  She passed On Wednesday the 20th at the age of 65.  No cause provided but it was noted that her close friends knew she was in declining health.

I still love Babylon 5 and rank her role as Delenn as the best and most compelling character of the series.

Her Twitter account has this last quote from her, “I look at the stars. It’s a clear night and the Milky Way seems so near. That’s where I’ll be going soon. ‘We’re all star stuff’, I suddenly remember Delenn’s line from Joe’s script. Not a bad prospect. I am not afraid. In the meantime, let me close my eyes and sense the beauty around me. And take that breath under the dark sky full of stars. Breathe in. Breathe out. That’s all,”

Update 2020 (13)

Tern Class

Continuing to work on a few projects that have been sitting around.  I have many ‘mostly done’ models sitting in the queue.

This is another in my own series of Seldom Seen Ships of the Fleet.  The Tern class is a system survey ship.  The Federation has many star systems that are devoid of or inhospitable to life.  These systems do have, potentially, massive amounts of resources that could be utilized by the Federation.  These ships were built to explore these systems and catalog the various planets, minor planets, moons and asteroids.

I’m working on the textures now.  Mostly done with the principal maps and then can complete the bump maps.

Update 2020 (12)

It has been awhile!

I took off a couple months and drove across the country to see relatives. Spent some extended time in Wisconsin and Maryland. Went into DC to see the public monuments not impacted by closures and no crowds.

Finally found time, a couple of weeks ago, to open up my tools again. I had a creative block on my drone project that followed my time off. Worked through it and finished it.

I created an all new central hull that captured the look I had always wanted.  I was trying for an analog to contemporary drones.  I then had to texture as well.  I tried getting fancy and unwrapped the mesh but hated how it came out.  Ended up using real basic flat map projections on the whole thing.

The final – Salamis class combat drone.

Adding to my ‘Seldom Seen’ list of ships project.

Update 2020 (11)

Finished.

I am going to end up adding this to my ‘Lesser Known’ series of Federation ships.

Mesh built in Wings3D
Textures created in Photoshop (CS5)
Rendered in 3D Max

Update 2020 (10)

Still here 🙂

Put my last project on hold to try and finish a very old one. I reopened my Aquila model to see if I could finally finish it. I thought it just needed some texture tweaks and I would be done.

Yeah… No.

I threw away all the textures and started over. I had over paneled the originals and had these ridiculous specular maps. I just did not like it anymore. Thought I had the source PSD files for all the line elements to make it ‘easy’.

Yeah… No.

The engine source file was still around, oddly, so that was a tweak of about 5 minutes. Had to redraw everything else. So, of course, I changed everything.

With that, I then decided to remodel the bridge upper deck section. I decided the shuttle deck would not be on top and put it on the bottom. I added to fusion rectors and a bunch of giga-joule capacitors to the upper deck (explained below).

Still more to do. Images are single pass so illuminated elements are over saturated. No bump maps yet.

This is a Mako class battle cruiser. The Aquila is 1 of 8 built of the class. The design was one of a few proposed for purpose built combat ships to counter Dominion incursions. Like the Defiant class, it suffered from a number of issues that ultimately limited the production to 8.

It deploys a unique, high energy, pulse PHASER system. The system has dedicated port/starboard fusion reactors that power the weapons. Each bank can target multiple targets deriving power from capacitor banks allowing for up to 6 individual targets per array. This system ultimately proved difficult to maintain and needed further time to develop. The Defiant class was able to overcome it’s issues and was ultimately selected.

Update 2020 (9)

Completed the newly named Shackleton class explorer. This is the Shirase after the Japanese Antarctic explorer. One of 8 ships attached to the Far Horizon class mega star ship for my own Trek ‘would love to see’ series.

More on that some time soon.

Anyway….

Original design

Update 2020 (8)

I was looking at my gallery and many of the images are in 800×600 format which was the standard resolution for the day. That was soooooooooo long ago. Sadly, a few of the models are lost. I did come across the Sparta (below) and it was still in the original rigging I last used.

I’ve rendered it out at a much higher resolution and was impressed I had put so much effort into the textures. This model has an interior as well. I used a better background for it as well (planet by me).

I updated my gallery to reflect this.

Update 2020 (7)

I went ahead and tried to upscale the secondary engineering / science hull, as you can see, I scrapped it. It just looked odd and too much like some designs out there where folks just threw on extra Connie hulls.

Some texture updates. Just a few final bits and then bump maps. Should be done soon (har..har).