Skybus WIP

Well, on my first Sunday off in a while that wasn't devoted to recovering from an eventful Saturday, I did nothing of really any consequence - but that's what a day off is for, right? Instead, I plopped myself down at the computer and fussed with an old model, my 'upgraded' shuttle (actually, I think it's more of a pinnace!) for TOS.

I was looking through my pix, and the previous version of this popped up ([link]) and I just decided to play around with the model and try to make it a little better, or at least more complete - the original shot had been just the shell, without any interior, so I thought I'd re-export the model with the interior parts included and re-render it.

Typically, for me, that meant tweaking this and that, then discovering something else, tweaking that, and so on. The biggest issue, though, was the preponderance of smoothing artifacts I was getting, plus I noticed that I had really neglected to fix all the polys that 'wrapped' around corners, something that's a serious Poser no-no. Every time I imported the model, though, no matter what I did, I got smoothing artifacts that were unacceptable. It seems that Lightwave 9.5, for all the many nice things it added, really screwed up the OBJ export feature when it comes to making models that Poser 'likes'; I take all this time carefully splitting vertices and when it exports, it seems to weld them all back together and Poser turns the finished model into something that looks like it's covered in Silly Putty!

So, after months of using the new machine and lamenting not being able to resurrect the old one that had Lightwave 7.5 on it, I finally bit the bullet and re-installed it on the new box - from now on, even if it's not the primary modeler, 7.5 is going to be the final pipe to export my models for Poser, since it treats my OBJs with respect .

There's still a lot to do on this model - it's not rigged, and the interior still isn't as detailed as I'd like it. I'm considering, since it's pretty much all original design, making a for-sale version that doesn't include the nacelles, Starfleet markings or the newly-added sensor domes, and making the 'TOS parts' a freebie set to augment the model (much as Oshikai did with his Retro Skirt, worn here by Uhura ); I still don't know about that.

The sharp-eyed amongst you will notice that I 'borrowed' the nacelles from the Crossbow-class starship, with minor modifications - the old ones I had were just too simplistic, IMHO.