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
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.
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).
Returned to working on the Himlico as part of my lesser known series of ships. I made a few slight changes to the warp engine layout as they were too close into the primary engineering section.
The secondary engineering ‘pod’ looks a little odd but is to the correct scale when compared to a constitution class (which the back story is that it is related).
Most of the big maps are done. The nacelles and all the bump maps need to be completed.
I noticed that I did not build out the two hanger decks. I always build them and then never use them. I once did on a SFM ship I did for Masao but never since. Lots of time saved.
Despise or admire him? Crazy man or visionary? Some say the former but I say the later. Elon Musk is a true pioneer and has put the US back into a preeminent leadership position in space exploration.
I watched the launch yesterday (5/30/2020) and was beyond thrilled with the perfect launch and the first stage recovery. My wife, who thinks space is a waste of money was probably more excited and cried through the hole thing. She is a free market champion and saw this as our future (and to be honest she was looking for something inspiring from the current news). She called our granddaughter and video chatted with her during the whole thing from 30 minutes before launch through stage-2 separation.
SpaceX is going to put humans on Mars and beyond. China and Russia want the moon for military dominance and economic greed. The US, onto itself, has lost it’s way. Bezos and Branson just want to make money to have people look down from the highest point possible.
I watched the docking this morning (prefect and early). Now the ship has been christened Endeavour. I know the crew named it after the shuttle and the Apollo 15 ships but it is an incredible name. It goes beyond the homage and looks to the future of our travels, discoveries and accomplishments to come in space.
Thank you SpaceX and thank you Elon Musk.
Just wasted a considerable amount of time on a project I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I would like to have a series based on ships of the Federation that have gone unnoticed. I figure there are lots of ship types (given the size of the Federation) that were designed and then forgotten.
Anyway, I went to my archives as I have a few of these already done and put the following together. I had forgotten what a mess this mesh was. The texture tree was so wonky and I had originally made all these weird specular maps. I had also tossed (or lost) the original PSD files so I tried to start over. Ultimately I gave up and just did a basic ambient and shadow pass then called it a day.
Back Story
The DeGamma class was a purpose built early warning ship built after the Romulan incursion of 2265. The report sent back by the USS Enterprise showed the Romulans had developed cloaking technology that made the neutral zone bases vulnerable (a modern day Maginot line). The response was a medium size cruiser utilizing strong deep space scanning. The scanning equipment was housed in the back half of the engineering section. This gave the ability to probe for ship movements beyond the Romulan side of the neutral zone where cloaking would not be needed. With the further revelation of Romulans appearing to be related to Vulcans, or at the very least being able to pass for one, the ship was covertly designed and given a cover as a extended range surveyor. Only a small number were built.
Got distracted.
Have all my textures updated and or completed. Still need to complete the shuttle bay details if I want any aft view shots. Need to move on to the mother-ship now.
These are all just simple single pass renders. The first two were mostly done test images and the last three are of the complete ship. Thanks for looking 🙂
Notice I have tired of pithy titles.
Minor update as texturing progresses. I really hate texturing because I am so OC about them. I ran a quick pass (non composited) today with the lower half of the hull applied. I like the interior illumination of the cabin / rooms better than on the saucer. I can remedy the saucer but it will take a bit of work.
Not sure why the deflector needs to glow (though I have done that on previous ships) but it is how they started to do it with TNG ships. That could use a tweak as well.
I also have adjusted the smoothing on all the various object elements after importing the Wings mesh into MAX. Takes a bit of time.
The name is KENNEDY but that is a placeholder. I’d like to name these ships after great bodies of water that explorers needed to traverse.
