Posts

The End of the Project (11th Dec - Deadline day)

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Hoo boy. It's 7:22 am and I just pulled an all-nighter to finish this thing. The amount of tedious, repetitive work that went into finishing this thing was... indescribable, to say the least (although that's probably more to do with the fact that I'm just really sleepy). As usual, I'm terrible with the intros to these things, so let's just get into the actual meat of things. First things first: the warp nacelles. These were easy to make; a combo of a spline in the viewport extruded to make the main body, along with some boolean-ing to create the weird curved section at the front. This was the easy part, and had me feeling rather optimistic about the completion time of the whole thing. Most of the detail would be carried by the textures anyway, right? Oh, how naive I was..... Some shots of the model before I began the texturing process. Okay, so... remember how in the last post I had a link to download textures to use for the model? (The incomparable  https://www.ale...
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THE MAIN BODY'S DONE (9th Dec - 2 days to deadline)

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 (If you're wondering why the deadline things in the titles don't match up, the deadline's actually the 11th, not the 12th. Oops...) I DID IT I DON'T KNOW HOW BUT SOMEHOW I FINISHED IT THE MAIN BODY OF THE ENTERPRISE-D IS COMPLETE AND THE ONLY THINGS I HAVE TO MODEL NOW ARE THE WARP NACELLES GLAMOUR SHOTS TIME BABYYYY (Side note: if, upon further inspection, the mesh looks weird and disjointed, that's because it is; I had to suture together disparate planes with different numbers of segments, so I just added a lot of vertices and target-welded them together, instead of adding full edge loops like I would have in Maya. End result: a ton of n-gons and lots of poor 3D modelling in terms of good practice; however, since the model isn't actually going to be used in anything other than renders, I can get away with it.)
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Secondary Hull Update (8th Dec - 4 Days to Deadline)

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  The main section of the secondary hull is pretty much done, bar a few adjustments to make it conform with the overall ship's silhouette. I recreated the shape in one viewport using a plane, moved the edge loops and vertices in the other views to get the correct curvature, and smoothed out the bumpiness with the Relax tool under Freeform Modelling I've also managed to get my hands on a complete set of Enterprise-D textures from https://www.alex3d.at/download/1707-d-textures/ : these include both specular and normal maps for the object, which should greatly improve the final presentation.
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December 5 Update

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  This is how far I've gotten with the secondary hull. My original plan of making the splines in 3 dimensions and then converting that to an editable mesh didn't work, because as it turns out the Surface modifier got confused as to what the relative directions of the faces should be. The new approach is to create the shape in one viewport, and move the vertices accordingly in the other two. Although the new method has the benefit of actually working, it presents a new issue; it's far more time-consuming. The project's due in exactly a week, and I still haven't even sorted out the later steps like the textures, so.... this is going to be a challenge. Well, guess I'll have to buckle up and spend far more time on completing the model and getting it to look good. At least almost all of the submissions for my other courses are done, meaning I have more time to devote to this.
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One More Update, On Both Projects This Time

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 Wow, I really need to come up with more interesting post names... So, as per usual, it's been a while since the last update. Since I have no idea how to introduce these things anymore, I'm just gonna get into the actual details of what I've been working on. First up, of course, is project 1: The One Where You Jam Things Onto Google Earth. I did a test with the newly-retextured model, as shown in the previous post, placing it on Merchiston Avenue, the site of an actual police box (although the real-life counterpart is considerably more rusty and shambolic). The results were.... "Oh, ugh, ew! What's that unsightly lump?!" That, my dear reader, is the attempt that Google's AI tools have made to recreate the real-life police box. ...Yeah. Not very artistically minded, are they? I genuinely don't know what's happened here; it's not like they don't have any other reference images whatsoever, since the street's been captured in Street View. M...
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An Exceedingly Minor Update

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 I changed around the textures on the model to make it look closer to actual police boxes. I still haven't decided where I should place it, but I'm leaning toward Merchiston Avenue for the moment. That's all for now, I guess...
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Geolocation Project Update

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 Okay, so a lot has happened between this post and the last one. I began modelling the police box in Maya based on the schematic from TardisBuilders.com (by user starcross ): I created separate models for the roof and the corner posts, and assembled them together in a separate file: Normal post (center of police box) Corner post (with slightly indented section) Roof of the police box Final police box model I then exported it as an fbx file to be imported into 3DS Max, where I could texture it. The only problem was, I didn't have a decent set of pictures of the same police box to use for the UV Map of the model. I was planning to go out and photograph a police box, but the one on Google Maps on Leith Walk (at least, I think that's what the road was called) was in the process of being converted into a mini-restaurant.  Needless to say, that plan was a no-go (unless I can find another police box with its original paint job intact), so I decided to use the blueprint as a base to c...
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