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So, I recently put up a mini type 6 shuttlecraft that I built mostly as a "How small can I make a shuttle and still have it be functional?" quickie, but with the intent of eventually using it as a scale reference to build other ships around. Started out with building some shuttlebays, piddling with logic, and finally got the urge to build a scaled ship around that shuttlecraft.
First question I had to answer, what Federation ship was I going to build? Well, lets just be honest, of course its going to be an Enterprise. But which one? Newer, older, A, B, C, D, E? Then it hit me, I'm gonna build the sexiest Enterprise of them all.
And since I don't use mesh importers (I consider that cheating), I'm building this all by hand, the old fashioned way baby! Figured some of you might be interested in seeing how I do it, so I'll put up step by step instructions so you can see how to do it by hand.
First thing I did was make scaled orthogonals.
I had to make these myself based on a mesh I downloaded a while back. I used my art program of choice (Corel's Paintshop Pro) to resize all of the views to exactly the same pixel dimensions, and then looked back at the shuttlecraft I was using for working scale. I wanted the shuttlebay to be able to house 2 shuttles, given 11m width of the shuttles, some wiggle room on either side, and scaled the entire image down so that 1 pixel = 1m = 1 block.
After that, it was time to trace.
Green pixels are actual blocks, red lines are mirror axis. Used a lot of copy/pastes to make sure all the various sections were perfectly scaled to each other. Once we take out the layer with the ship itself, its much easier to see.
(note the 11m shuttle by the bay doors for scale)
The advantage here is that the green pixel skeleton gives you the exact placement for your blocks in game.
Here I've used the zoomed in section to get block counts to start the dome on the top of the bridge.
Once the + skeleton is in there, then its just a case of using the build tools to calculate out the rings at each level.
Blocking it all out in standard gray armor, wedging it all to get the basic shape down, and then just keep repeating that process as it moves down. To make the egg shaped section under the done, the front half was just circle build tool, then the back half was using the ellipse tool with a height of 1, and using the green pixel art to get distances.
Here's where I've mostly finished the bridge module, and went back to replace the dome with some ice and white light, and done some cutouts for the viewscreen.
I'll put more up as I complete more.
First question I had to answer, what Federation ship was I going to build? Well, lets just be honest, of course its going to be an Enterprise. But which one? Newer, older, A, B, C, D, E? Then it hit me, I'm gonna build the sexiest Enterprise of them all.
And since I don't use mesh importers (I consider that cheating), I'm building this all by hand, the old fashioned way baby! Figured some of you might be interested in seeing how I do it, so I'll put up step by step instructions so you can see how to do it by hand.
First thing I did was make scaled orthogonals.
I had to make these myself based on a mesh I downloaded a while back. I used my art program of choice (Corel's Paintshop Pro) to resize all of the views to exactly the same pixel dimensions, and then looked back at the shuttlecraft I was using for working scale. I wanted the shuttlebay to be able to house 2 shuttles, given 11m width of the shuttles, some wiggle room on either side, and scaled the entire image down so that 1 pixel = 1m = 1 block.
After that, it was time to trace.
Green pixels are actual blocks, red lines are mirror axis. Used a lot of copy/pastes to make sure all the various sections were perfectly scaled to each other. Once we take out the layer with the ship itself, its much easier to see.
(note the 11m shuttle by the bay doors for scale)
The advantage here is that the green pixel skeleton gives you the exact placement for your blocks in game.
Here I've used the zoomed in section to get block counts to start the dome on the top of the bridge.
Once the + skeleton is in there, then its just a case of using the build tools to calculate out the rings at each level.
Blocking it all out in standard gray armor, wedging it all to get the basic shape down, and then just keep repeating that process as it moves down. To make the egg shaped section under the done, the front half was just circle build tool, then the back half was using the ellipse tool with a height of 1, and using the green pixel art to get distances.
Here's where I've mostly finished the bridge module, and went back to replace the dome with some ice and white light, and done some cutouts for the viewscreen.
I'll put more up as I complete more.
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