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

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.alex3d.at/) Well, turns out that the texture images were specifically built in a way where they would only work with the original topology, meaning I had to fall back on the old method of projection mapping. The problem with this, though, was that there weren't any photos of the Enterprise from the TV show where the ship wasn't at an angle. I also couldn't just use the photos that I'd been using for modelling reference, because a) there weren't enough of them to cover all the surfaces, and b) the lighting was inconsistent between photos.

The right side of the ship is brightly lit...

...and now it's the left!

The nacelles are casting shadows on the secondary hull, unlike the other two

Fortunately, the model itself was also available to download from the same site, so my plan was to render out some images with it in uniform lighting to use as texture images. Unfortunately, the FBX and OBJ exports (aka the only versions I could import into 3DS Max) were completely broken, meaning the original Cinema 4D version was the only viable option.

I ended up downloading the trial version of Cinema 4D after hours of fiddling about with the FBX model trying to get it to not break, and rendered texture images from that. This is the final map image I used for my model:-

You will have immediately noticed that the lighting of the model in these images is absolutely not uniform. While I was rendering the reference images with C4D, I moved the lights about to get a better image, because the even lighting looked extremely bland. The end result of all of this is that the textures used in my model have a sort of semi-intentional baked lighting effect (aka the lighting effects are part of the textures themselves as opposed to being calculated during the render process).

I wish I could say I changed the lighting around for some deep artistic reason, but to be honest I can't really remember why I did it. Perhaps it was some mysterious insight unlocked by the ethereal aura of 3 am, hidden from my own consciousness.... meh, probably not.

Anywho, one more problem with this method was that since it was the trial version of C4D, you couldn't actually render and export images the normal way. You could, however, render the images in the viewport you were working in, which was good enough as a workaround, but had the effect of limiting the resolution of the texture images (I had to get the images via screencap, my laptop screen is 1920 x 1080, and the viewport is obviously gonna be smaller than that).

To be perfectly frank, I'm not happy with the way the final textures turned out. The low resolution hampered things a lot, but I'm also not entirely confident with UV mapping (mainly getting everything to align with the texture image), a problem exacerbated by the fact that there were exceedingly small differences between the topology of my model and the base model, which added up to create a lot of subtly misaligned textures on surfaces.

The method I used was:

1) Highlight all the faces of the surface that needed to be textured, in whatever viewport you wanted to project the thing with (I had to do this manually, which is probably where most of my night was spent.)

2) Use the UVW Map modifier to create a planar map, then convert that into a poly again, highlight the faces (thankfully not manually again) and map it within the UV editor in the Unwrap UVW modifier

At least, at the end of the day, I got this pretty sweet (if a bit basic) render that looks like it could have come straight from the TV show!

(minus the space background, of course, I haven't had the time to add that)

I'm gonna go sleep now.....