Any advice for modelling those phaser array strips on TNG era federation starships like the enterprise D, voyager, Enterprise e, etc? I’d like to cut some on some oddly curved hull sections.
I generally make them as separate parts, what have you got so far?
ok, here’s where I’m at.
This in the hull I’m working on.
Here is the unphasered side.
Here’s the side I modeled a phaser strip onto by making a circle, spreading in out along the y axis, shrinkwrapping it to the hull, then extruding it and the middle part.
Closeups on t6he ends after setting the subsurf to 2.
It’s not quite what I wanted, I.m not sure exactly hw phaser array strips looked up close in STTNG but from a distance they look fairly good, Close up I’m not sure, or maybe I’m being too critical of myself.
I thought the phaser arrays or at least the raider emitter section were rounder, almost like a half cylinder. Anyone want to offer sage advice? I mean I am close to it I think, I’m not asking people to do it for me really.
Hmm, having looked up exctreme closeups of the models with phaser strips I find these useful images.
I could easily model these as straight lines. I wouldn’t mind knowing a way to define a section of hull and "mold " the array to it without screwing it up. Any tips? I know you can do a lot with beizer curves but so far I haven’t needed to do that. Could I define a series of hull faces as a path or something and conform the array to them or should I model the array detail after shrinkwrapping a separate object to the hull? Ideas?
Ok I wasn’t getting very far with shrinkwrap and new meshes. I copied the hull segments, subsurfed them and then shrinkwrapped, then extruded and modeled. Now I have this.
Any other way to do this? Deform object along path, etc?
Well, finally spent a couple days on it and got what looks like as good as i’m going to get. it’s not exactly what i wantewd and does show issues up close but it’s stil not bad from a distance.
the side and front array have their good and bad points, i may redo them both to get it right. Yes I made them bronze colored for reasons.
Looking good so far, approximately how big is your ship? Galaxy class or the size of a runabout or somewhere inbetween?
Well, a galaxy class was 2100’ long. (Yes I’m an american, i still use feet.) The ship I made was by an odd coincidence 2000’ feet long to the inch. (Yep, still say inch too)
So it was about 5% or so shorter than a galaxy class. A galaxy class’s saucer likely had more volume than her lander did, but her engineering hull was bigger so they may have been pretty comparable in most respects of size and volume. My ship had lager warp nacelles and 3 of them too.
Hey all, I think I’m finished with my phaser array design. Here’s what I ended up with.
I want to make it clear that the glowing ren panels are NOT the phaser amitters, those are the black panels. The red ones are thermal emitter panels that serve to radiant heat from the phasers to space. The issue of phaser cooling has been a big one since “Balance of terror” where a phaser coolant gas leak killed a crewman on the enterprise and nearly got the ship destroyed by a romulan warbird. So if we stay faithful to trek cannon phaser cooling is an issue and the red panels represent part of a cooling system. So in battle where the phasers are being used heavily these things would glow more and more as more and more heat was produced by firings that had to be dealt with. It would not fully replace phaser coolant, just help the overall thermal management system.
Looking at the models from TNG and Voy the phaser array strips are somewhat similar in concept with with somewhat different applications of existent technology. I must repeat this ship is based on federation tech but is not a federation ship designed and built by the federation, her creator took fed tech and used it to create a ship with very different design philosophies and intentions.
And yes the warp engines have phaser arrays on top of them just like the future enterprise d did. They are mounted in a large plate that protects the phaser arrays and the engines from being disrupted by each other’s emissions.
I modeled them somewhat more on voyager’s phasers then ent D’s as I assumed voyagers phasers may be a slightly more advanced design due to voyager being a later model starship than the D as I took it. It would have been easier to make them a litle more ;like voyager’s than i did by simply pulling the center section up and producing an angular sided array but i beveled them to give rounded sides for some reason, possibly to suggest a wider field of fire.