Anim8or Community

If you haven't tried .96 yet, I highly recommend it.  In my own experience it's been every bit as stable as .95 but it packs the awesome UV tools.

97...I don't use that either, it's very unstable on my system.  Even when it doesn't crash, it distorts textures badly in every render I have attempted.

Oh, and to answer your question...I've heard of Stargate, saw the movie.  Never watched the series.

Added the Indomitable Class.

This is an interesting one.  Around the time the FASA game was in its heyday, there was a magazine called Stardate that was sort of a supplement to the game in much the same way that Dragon Magazine was to Dungeons & Dragons.

At the back of Stardate was "Jaynz Ships of the Galaxy" in which they would create original ships to be used with the game.

The one that caught my eye was the Indomitable.  It was clearly just a kitbash, combining the Excelsior saucer section with an elongated Enterprise engineering section and warp nacelles, but I thought it looked sweet, long and sleek:





Despite the fact that the "flavor text" describes the ship class as having been built around the same time as the Excelsior, I decided to give it a go - and to make a Original Series era version of the ship.  I built it according to the blueprints, tossed it into the scene...and it looked Godawful.  Even though the blueprints always looked cool to me, in 3D this ship looked bizarre at best.

So, after making a few modifications, most notably making the saucer section much larger than in the blueprint, I finally got it so it looks pretty good to me.

One other note, in the flavr-text blurb the registry numbers of this class were supposed to be 2010-2020.  Since I went with an original-series era version of the class, this wouldn't have made sense, so I changed it to 1970.

Anyway, here she is:

Hmm, I think the hinge looks like it's in the right place, the thing to me that makes it look a bit unnatural is that when you open the cover of a book, the whole binding is going to sort of tilt and bend to the left.

Overall it looks very good, and the bending page looks great.

Kahlua17: I left them as meshes.

Blank Studios: Regarding the Loknar, I think it's just the camera perspective, but I'll recheck it to the schematic.  Regarding the Klingon textures, I totally agree with you.  The textures on those ships are just placeholders at the moment - it's just the plain Federation texture set darker.  Because those ships are a lot more "irregular" than the Federation ships, I think I'm going to have to do an unwrap on those.

If I follow you correctly what you're trying to do is make a transparency map texture?

Basically how it works is black areas will be totally transparent fading up to opague where the luminosity increases.

EcoTyler: Thanks.  As to selling them to a game company, I think there would be problems there.  Since Star Trek is a IP owned by Paramount or whoever it is these days, I doubt they'd appreciate me selling them their own stuff.

Not to mention there's already a VAST body of Star Trek work out there, the mod community for just about every Star Trek game in recent history has put out a tremendous amount of high-quality work.  In fact, if memory serves and my who's who is correct there's a guy out there that did some tremendous mod work for the game Bridge Commander.  BC'c graphics looked pretty good out of the box, the replacement models/textures this guy modded in made them look near movie quality.  He was then actually employed by whatever company did Star Trek: Legacy.  Again, this is to the best of my knowledge and I THINK it's all the same guy.

Another peice of advice:

If you make a lot of changes or additions to your project, save as a lot of different files as you are progressing, i.e.

Enterprise-1
Enterprise-2
Enterprise-3

etc.

This way if there's been an error or something you weren't aware of, you have something recent to fall back on.  Undo is your friend, but if you close the file, Anim8or crashes, or you switch to another mode (ie.e scene) your undo information is lost.

Looks good so far.

C&C:

Shingles:  They look rather shiny and metallic.  Is this intended?
Saloon Doorway: To me this looks WAY too wide.

As to your question about how amny buildings, well, being the Old West you pretty much have a free hand to make it as big or as small as you like.  Most of those places started off as tiny mining camps of one kind or another and grew or died from there.

Looking very good so far, I too would like to see some other angles.