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NCCLegacy - p1

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Description

Here's a long coming commission for my friend =Trakker. He had made a diagram of the ship and was looking for someone to model it in 3d:



At the time I was looking for a good opportunity to practice more hard surface modeling so I offered to take it up as a means to learn more. The subject seemed to have just the right amount of hard and organic elements to challenge my current skills, and even though it took far longer than I anticipated (mainly due to work and other obligations getting in the way), I can say that I got a great deal of experience doing this piece.

As you may guess, it's a ship based in the Star Trek universe, so I decided to roll with the recent reboot/refresh/update and try to match the look of the Star Trek 2009 film. Below is a bit of what I did to make this piece.

Process

I started by blocking out the basic shapes in Maya, then took it into Zbrush to warp and curve. From there I went back and fourth, readjusting the the topology and applying subdivision surfaces (sometimes called 'clark-catmull' or smooth preview)' to the model.

I then started unwrapping the uvs for each component and then procedurally tiled the textures and layered them with appropriate effects like bump, specular and incandessence. As a final touch, I used uv sets to project decals and lettering over the procedural textures. I'd say that these parts were the most challenging. There was a lot of trial and error involved. I tried zbrush to texure but the model resolution was becoming problematic. I also tried photoshop's new 3d features but it was too slow/memory intensive to work. Ultimately I settled on Mudbox, which is Autodesk's answer to Zbrush. I'm not fond of the sculpting tools in there compared to Zbrush, but the texture painting is much more streamlined in that you can edit the texture file itself and preview the effects as opposed to painting directly on polygons.

From this point, I began developing the shaders for each component, experimenting with material based lights, caustics, transparencies and glow sources. I also experimented with image based lighting (IBL) and used an environment sphere of the milky way galaxy from a site called sIBL. I also figured out how to render out different passes in an efficient way through mental ray.

Finally I took all of the passes into AfterEffects to composite together and add finishing touches, which was a fairly new process for me. I learned about image masks, light wraps, pre-comps and anamorphic lens flares (Yes, those lovely streaked flares you see in sci-fi and action flicks all the time XD).

Anyway, the next plan for this model is to make a short fly through/around animation, which will certainly hone what I learned in AE so far. =]

Many thanks to =Trakker for your patience and encouragement. I hope you enjoy the piece as much as I did making it. *bows respecftully*

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1920x1080px 3.37 MB
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