The Enterprise, Ongoing

I’ve been adding a bunch of little lights. It hasn’t been easy, at all. I won’t bore you with the process, but there’s gotta’ be a better way of doing it than the two methods I use. Nevertheless it’s good practice doing it the crude way.

The main disc is DONE! All the little lights, all the lettering and decals are in place (oh no, I will probably vary the colors of the lights a bit). I’ve adjusted and re-adjusted, and redid from scratch virtually every element.

Above is where I was working on the landing bay in the back. All those intersecting curves were intense to realize. Blender does not, like CAD, make inherent smooth curves. It works exclusively in polygons. So, the curves have to be achieved in roundabout ways.

But it really comes together when I experiment with putting my model in an HDR space background.

Now the little, pain-in-the-ass lights start to shine.

Croly Hap! I can almost hear the theme song. It’s so beautiful. Not that I’m responsible for the design of the starship, obviously.

I’m still in awe of the software. It seems a miracle that this model is completely fabricated by numbers and computations, let alone that I pieced it together myself from scratch, starting with one cylinder.

Just because I’ve gotten this far doesn’t mean I’ll be able to pull off the whole ship. Their are still some very challenging parts. The front of the engines have multicolored lights behind a an array of bars, and under a semi-opaque surface. If I had more experience before attempting this, that wouldn’t be that difficult. But I’m going to have to figure out how to do it through trial and error. I have some ideas.

My Enterprise can’t fly. It’s got no propulsion units yet!

To be continued…