Pretty new to Blender and all things 3D modelling but hoping someone here can help.
I’m looking for a model of a Sovereign Class starship, like the Enterprise-E. I’ve found meshes that are in .max or .3ds (like ones I’ve found on Star Trek Meshes) but I don’t have access to either of those and the only conversion I found was broken in all sorts of ways. I’ve also tried converting from earlier versions of Blender but it seems to lose all the textures and that’s where my inexperience takes hold. I can’t figure a way to make it work.
Does anyone know where I can find a good model that’s ready to go for Blender or any suggestions for converting? My use case is animating it for videos for our Star Trek RPG game.
I’ve seen those. I’m just not great at textures yet. I might have to get a hammer and figure it out though. I’m just working a deadline. Thanks for the heads up!
Nice! Thanks for pointing that out to me. It’s pretty clear I have a lot to learn since I’m not entirely sure how to download and use it but I’ll add it to my list to learn. Thank you!
I tried this one before and it looks great, I’m just having some serious problems figuring out why I can’t get it to work for me.
First off, for some reason I can’t seem to get the scene bright enough to see the ship itself. The textures are all there, I just can’t see them. If I turn up the light in the scene then it also brightens the decals and the windows, nacelles, and everything else. So my lack of experience rears its ugly head again.
That also leads to the other thing I’ve found which is that I can’t seem to change the value of the emission for the nacelles separate from the windows. So I can’t have them get brighter before moving to warp or anything without the windows getting brighter as well.
Basically I just don’t seem to have enough control to animate it in videos as I’m hoping to.
You’ll need to make custom mask textures to do the nacelle effect and similar things so you can control them independently. It’s not as difficult as it seems, it’s just a lot of things to learn/do.
I’m working on the Glendelbert mesh to get it ready and I’ve got a question:
Is there a way aside from manually adding windows to the mesh to make them look more like part of the ship? The windows right now are an image texture sitting on top, which you can see through to the base texture when the camera gets close.
I found this https://blendermarket.com/products/window-generator which I may be able to use, but before I spend the money I wanted to see if there was something I’m missing since it seems images are usually the default way to handle these from what I’ve seen.
Thought I’d post a quick update: I ended up grabbing the Geblendert model suggested by @ajm. I ended up retexturing the entire mesh and completely building the nacelles, wings, impulse engines, and yacht from scratch. It’s not perfect and there are still some things I want to improve but it turned out okay.
I’m still trying to figure out some details and I may keep trying to refine bits and pieces. I can’t quite figure out displacement on the saucer so I’m sticking to bump but hopefully I can find some help there. But our Star Trek RPG starts up again in a week so this will take a back seat for a bit.
Thanks for the guidance here. I learned A LOT and while there’s still a lot to learn out there I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.
