Star Trek Discovery Enterprise - Scaled Build WIP

    Edymnion

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    Okay, been working on finishing the secondary hull. Still got the lower back third to go, but making progress.
    starmade-screenshot-0001.jpg

    starmade-screenshot-0000.jpg

    Don't worry, I'll cut more lights into the hull and get the pinstripes extended later. Mostly trying to get the shapes down at the moment.

    Okay now, I'm going to put this one in a spoiler block because its a huge freaking animated GIF straight from the Starmade hotkey rip, and I don't really have anything to convert it into anything smaller.


    Okay, you can expand that to watch as you so desire, just didn't want it to start auto-loading with the rest of the page.

    Now then, what we have is the blast doors that make up the shuttlebay doors I've separated into slices and linked them to activators. One activator controlling mirrored slices (and the last activator controlling the center line door slice).

    Little hard to see in the gif (sorry about angle and all that not being perfect), but my control structure is a line of daisy chained Delay blocks (one delay is linked to the next one in sequence). Each delay block is then linked to a Not block on the opposite end of the Not row. So there are 16 Delay and Not blocks there. Delay #1 is linked to Not #16. Delay #2 is linked to Not #15. And so on. Then, both the Delay and the Not for a given row (as in Delay 1 and Not 1) are both linked into a flipflop. The flipflop then controls the activator next to it. And then the whole thing is controlled by a simple button/Flipflop at the start.

    So in effect, when the doors are open (activators off) and you press the button, it goes down the chain and activates the door slices from the outside in. When you press it again, the backwards Nots flip the flipflops in reverse order, so that the activators now change from the inside out. And what that ends up looking like is that the shuttlebay has two doors that slide in and out to open in the center, without actually needing rails or having to worry about where to hide the door blocks inside the rest of the hull.

    I did it this way because these doors are hemispherical, there wasn't going to be a good way to do these on rails that didn't involve at least a dozen different slices of door moving and rotating, and I don't think I could ensure that they moved together smoothly enough that you couldn't see a gap between the slats.

    So, ghetto animated door time!
     
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    Edymnion

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    Okay, she's finally got a butt!
    starmade-screenshot-0001.jpg

    starmade-screenshot-0002.jpg

    And I've also reworked the pinstriping so that I'm happier with it. Made it more 3D so it stands out as being a bit more than just "Oh, he used a few different colored blocks" as paint. Just gotta get the stripes extended back all the way now and that'll be done.
    starmade-screenshot-0004.jpg

    Got the rest of the lights installed.
    starmade-screenshot-0004.jpg
    Heh, once I'm done with this I've gotta go find a dark blue nebula and take some glamour shots...

    And just for pure amusement, the view from inside the shell is pretty weird.
    starmade-screenshot-0001.jpg

    That rectangle of light waayyy off in the distance in the upper middle there is actually the lighting for the viewscreen window in the saucer.
     
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    Edymnion

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    Okay, starting out on the struts, and damn are these hard.

    First off, sketch it all out so we can see the pixel patterns.
    STD Enterprise Design.jpg

    Now that we have the lines, we gotta start mapping them into Starmade in full 3D space. To do that, I'm using lights to outline the 2D front and top views.
    starmade-screenshot-0001a.jpg
    starmade-screenshot-0000.jpg

    From there, its just a matter of lining the solid blocks up in both directions.
    starmade-screenshot-0003.jpg

    To make sure I knew when to stop correctly, a line of white lights showed me the termination point.
    starmade-screenshot-0007.jpg

    After that, I counted up how thick the struts were and dropped down a solid sheet.
    starmade-screenshot-0009.jpg
    starmade-screenshot-0010.jpg

    I'm doing the same basic thing for the back side, but the shapes here are even more complicated so I'm using white lights to block out precisely where the solid blocks go.
    starmade-screenshot-0013.jpg

    So what have we learned? Crazy three dimensional diagonal lines are hard. :P
     

    Edymnion

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    Sorry, life happening, get back to this soon as I can!
     
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    Edymnion

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    Can't stop here, the bats will get you...
    Yeah, hole in the roof that leaked through the ceiling of a closet we don't use often. Lost some 50+ year old family photos, its just been a fun time all around. Long story short is we're ripping the entire closet out and having to redo it.
     
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    Gasboy

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    Yeah, hole in the roof that leaked through the ceiling of a closet we don't use often. Lost some 50+ year old family photos, its just been a fun time all around. Long story short is we're ripping the entire closet out and having to redo it.
    Bugger. Sucks to lose memories like that. :(
     
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    Edymnion

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    Okay, not a huge update, but I'm at least back at it!

    Doing a bit of rounding of the square edges of the pylons has proven quite a bit trickier than I expected.
    starmade-screenshot-0002.jpg
    starmade-screenshot-0003.jpg

    What I ended up having to do was to copy/paste a large section of the edge and save it off as a new ship (so I could respawn it in whenever I screwed up) and work on getting the edge worked out that way, and then copy/pasting it back over. And trying to get the right copy section down and getting it to paste in line was more trial and error than I really care to admit...

    Really had to do this with the underside (you can see the blue blocks being where I was working in different colors to tell what I was doing) where it got rather disorienting trying to keep everything straight. So copy/rotate/paste so that I was working from the top until I got what I wanted, then copy/rotate/paste it back into the main ship.

    Still gotta do the back side, and I'm HOPING when it comes time to cut the slit down the inside that I can copy/paste these edges and flip them around so I don't have to do this all again...

    Heh, if fake windows is the worst thing Nauv has to say about my build, I must be doing something very, very right! :)
     
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    Edymnion

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    She has some nice legs...
    Her calves are being a real PITA though.

    That weird combination of three dimensional line has rendered the backs of the pylons completely unworkable with copy/paste. Having to do the whole thing one block at a time.

    starmade-screenshot-0000.jpg

    I know it LOOKS like a repeating pattern, but there's *JUST* enough variability to screw the whole thing up if you try and paste your way out of it.

    Heh, looks like I'm using painter's tape.

    I don't think I'm going to be able to copy/rotate/paste in the rounding for the slits either, which means I get to do all this by hand again. Joy!
     
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    jayman38

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    This is why I gave up on my TMP refit attempt. Insufficient block shapes for true 3D swept wings.
     

    Gasboy

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    This is why I gave up on my TMP refit attempt. Insufficient block shapes for true 3D swept wings.
    Yeah, you have to accept compromises or rage quit.

    I got to the end of a TMP saucer section build, complete with interior, and then found out I had done it on even mode. Flew that one into a star and haven't tried canon ships since.
     

    Edymnion

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    Okay, through a combination of needing to know where the nacelles were going to meet the pylons to determine where the cutouts should go and more than a little "gawd I'm sick of rounding pylon corners", I decided to start the nacelles.

    Step 1, as usual, update the pixel map!
    STD Enterprise Design.jpg

    Using that and some light blocks, start mapping out where the center axis for the nacelles should be...
    starmade-screenshot-0000.jpg

    Then it was just more "follow the pixel art to make circles and smooth it out", then start roughing in the bussard collector clamps and getting those copy/rotated/pasted around.
    starmade-screenshot-0001.jpg

    starmade-screenshot-0003.jpg

    I'll probably end up dropping the nose of those clamps a bit more once I get the dome installed for the collectors, definitely round the tops of those brackets off a bit, but for now its looking pretty decent.

    In fact, she's really starting to look like the Enterprise now.
    starmade-screenshot-0005.jpg
    starmade-screenshot-0000a.jpg

    Still gotta go back and fix the registry on her though. I was apparently asleep when I put the name and number on her, because everybody knows the name is ABOVE the registry number on the saucer, not below it!
     
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    This looks beautiful. I really think you have to just power the creator's doubt on the pylons. They look about as good as I could possibly expect for the geometry of a voxel game.
     
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    Gasboy

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    This is looking very awesome. :) I'll take two please, one in light grey, another in pristine white. :D
    [doublepost=1553716074,1553715607][/doublepost]So I have a couple of questions, Edymnion.

    Where did you find the mesh for the ship? And what is the process of making the scaled orthogonals? I have a desire to make a few Star Trek ships now, thanks this thread, and in watching you, I see that the answers to my two questions will save me a lot of guess work. While still making it a fun challenge, as opposed to simply running a mesh through a few converters to get a filled up, chunky, lumpy Enterprise.