Since I've been playing around with texturing lately, I thought I would pull this ship out of mothballs and give it a paint job! Here's how it's turning out...
Texturewise, a lot of the hull stuff has been incorporated into the texture - NCC number, ship name, etc. Previously I was making these by literally making the text as an object and then doing a boolean intersection to cut it back to the shape of the hull. It worked, but was hardly an elegant solution. I still find it difficult to unwrap objects for textures, which in turn makes it hard to actually put stuff on the textures without it distorting all over the place. The NCC numbers on the underside of the hull, for instance - I literally had to warp the shape of the text in the texture image so that when blender then warped it to fit the object, the text would wind up distorted back to the way it should look in the first place. And because that's fiddly as hell to do, the only way to do it was trial and error, distorting it by different amounts, applying the texture, and seeing what it looked like. I'm sure there must be a better way to do this!
I also wonder if I'm not going too heavy on the texture, both in terms of how 'heavy' the panelling is and how bumpy the surface is. Maybe should be more subtle about it? Still, I like the way it came out.
The aft view. Making those shuttlebay doors is a serious PITA! I actually took the opportunity to expand that hull somewhat, giving room for three shuttles instead of two. I'm in two minds about whether the warp core should be in the forward section of that, or up in the saucer. Previously the travel pod dock and ion pod dock were down here, with the intention that this whole hull was dedicated to auxiliary craft of all sorts. I've moved the travel pod to the rim of the saucer instead.
Primary hull. Now making this text fit is easy. The original image is a square pattern, and blender distorts the shape of the hull, basically stretching it out over the pattern. The upshot is that if you put perfectly normal straight text on the texture, it automatically gets warped to fit the hull curvature. The problem in this case is making text that is actually flat - that's why the ship name, which was straight, is now curved. I can't work out how to straighten it!
A close up view. This close in, the texture is probably a bit too severe. But then if you make it smoother, in the wide shots it looks completely flat. I try to balance somewhere in the middle.
That's an Orion and an Andorian in the windows. I know Trek usually goes for windows as glowing panels to indicate a room inside, but I like to make them 'real' glass and put a simple internal room behind each window. It takes a while, but I like the effect.
Contemplating what to do next... maybe my border patrol ship, or perhaps the Connie?
