Ryan McClure

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So, tonight’s update has no discernible change (other than the addition of the dorsal phaser strip) from the previous, despite representing two evenings’ worth of intensive work! First, the pretty renders:

And now the technical explanation of WTF. It turns out that Cycles, in order to be faster, has a somewhat imprecise ray-to-triangle intersection algorithm. This manifested on Coro here in the form of the light from the interiors leaking through polygon seams! It wasn’t too bad at high light levels, but in dark renders it looked terrible. On a hunch, I decided to see what would happen if I fully enclosed the room objects, giving them an interior wall¹ with inward-facing normals to ray-intersect with the emitted light. Much to my relief, this actually worked like a charm! Of course, it was also a huge pain in the butt to vertex-snap all of the interior walls to the inside edge of the window inset, hence why it’s taken me two evenings to do!

Here’s a before/after image with the exposure cranked way up.

Let this be a lesson to any Blender folks out there who plan to put rooms behind their windows!

1. instead of making them more like open TV sets [↩]

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Someone asked about the modules having modules. There are actually two levels of modularity at play here. The idea is that you’d have a number of prefab module wedges that sit around ready to be picked up by a starship as-needed. They’re fully self-contained, so basically they could just sit floating in space near a starbase and a ship could swing by, dock with one, and head out on its mission.

Some modules are going to be dramatically different than others, necessitating a completely different interior structure than other modules. But not all of them! Some modules may not need any large structural changes, but only smaller mission-specific components swapped out. Perhaps you want four module types to all contain living quarters. That’s where the sub-modules come in. They’re designed to be pulled out and plugged in by a starbase (or other drydock facility) to create the prefabs the ships ultimately use.

From a modeling POV, it also lets me change the superficial components of each module without too much hassle. 😉

Spent most of a day on this, other than a break to watch the US vs. Russia Olympic hockey game.

There are some mesh errors around the top of the deck 8 windows (the outer-most ones) that I still need to deal with.

Windows and paneling (and “shield grid reinforcements”) on the ventral module surface. That blank flat area between the Deck 10 windows and the sort of square-bracket-shaped paneling will be home to the ventral phasers and banks of escape pods.

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This isn’t really a 3D update, but I’ve been plinking away at doing a paintover to plan out where details/surfacing/etc. are going to go. I’ve been heavily referencing the Sovereign class, with a dash of Intrepid thrown in here and there. I don’t intend to fully paint over the whole image; rather, just enough to get a plan in place before I start throwing geometry around. That’s why only one module is painted over, one half of the ship, etc.

The windows are actually geometry that’s been face-snapped onto the saucer and extruded slightly. The windows are all 0.75m across.¹ Since the decks are 2.45m from floor to ceiling (Coro is deliberately meant to feel more cramped than most Starfleet ships), I made the windows 1.35m tall, raising 1m off the floor and giving a 10cm clearance between the top arch of the window and the ceiling.

The inner-most windows shown (Deck E) are actually portholes when viewed edge-on; 0.75m circles. It’s only the extreme slope of the deck that makes them look so elongated. If you were standing inside the ship facing out one of those windows from where the “top” starts, you’d have 5 meters between you and the bottom of the window, which is awfully huge for a porthole. The Deck F windows (next row out) are the same vertical height as the Deck G (outermost) windows, yet they stick into a room almost as far as the Deck E portholes do. The Deck G windows, for contrast, only stick in about 1.8m — much more reasonable. So, I may ditch the E and F windows entirely.

The non-module windows have a different arrangement pattern than the modules do. The modules all share the same pattern.

I threw some annotations on the modular components to indicate intended functionality and relationships. The main phaser array interlocks emitters between the modular segments and the module spars, creating a single continuous strip regardless of the ship’s mission configuration.

Here’s where I left the paintover and decided to come back to modeling:

And here’s the current state of the model! The main hull is frozen and optimized here, though the modules, nacelles, and bridge (not pictured) are still unfrozen. I actually frozen the main hull at two detail levels (2 subdivisions and 3 subdivisions), then chopped certain pieces out of the 3-sub mesh and welded it into the 2-sub mesh in order to deal with some segmentation issues. Worked out surprisingly well and isn’t a trick I’ve tried before.

The hull texture on there is just something I slapped together to test for UV distortion² and probably won’t end up as a final texture in any way.

1. Some crude measurements of Sovereign windows indicated a width somewhere between 1.9 and 3.8 feet, leaning more toward the former [↩]
2. Of which some does appear along the center axis, which I’ll need to clean up [↩]

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This one’s going to require some backstory. 😀 But please do read it, as it will answer what are sure to be inevitable questions.

In 1991, the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual came out, as a codified version of the show’s technical bible intended for public consumption. At the very end of the book, the authors (Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda) included a set of four drawings for the potential future direction starships might take, ranging from familiar to bizarre. One of those designs has a pretty clear lineage in becoming the Sovereign class.¹ Another of those designs, though, had an interesting arrangement of modular segments comprising its saucer, along with wide warp nacelle pylons meant to allow the warp nacelle position to change mid-flight.²

An artist you might have heard of, Mark Kingsnorth, made a rough model of this ship in the late 1990s that gained some notoriety. It came to the attention of a fellow that goes by the handle “Jester”, who asked for Mark’s permission to use images of the model on a Star Trek IRC-based role-playing game website. The name of that game was U.S.S. Coronado…and I was one of the players.

Mark’s interpretation didn’t quite fit with what Jester wanted out of the ship. Jester called it the Katana-class, a frigate-sized ship centered around two major technologies: the launching of small, one-man fighter craft and the use of quantum slipstream drive.³ A neophyte CG artist myself at the time (1999), I offered to take a crack at providing Jester with an “in-house” version of the model that we could use to make any sort of shots he wanted. I knocked together a—by current standards—crude model in trueSpace, and away we went!

Later, in 2003, another player (and close friend of mine) on Coronado would build a new set of 2D orthographic blueprints, riffing on Sternbach’s original design and incorporating the various design elements that Jester had always intended for the game, namely the “slipstream” deflector as seen on Dauntless in “Hope and Fear” and catapult-style hangar bays for the ship’s Spectre class fighters. Having improved in skill significantly since the first trueSpace model, and now working in LightWave, I used these blueprints to make a new model of the ship.

The game ended in 2004, after 7 full years. Jester chose to end it then, since it mirrored the seven seasons enjoyed by TNG, DS9, and VOY. As a gift to both Jester and a wedding gift for the blueprint maker, I had a 36×24″ poster of the ship’s ortho renders and a few action shots, accompanied by specifications and signatures from many of the players, printed out for each of them, as well as myself. My copy currently hangs in my living room.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of Coro’s last game, which took place at the end of August. For the finale’s decennial, I wanted to create a new model that goes back to the sources that first inspired Jester — Sternbach’s original design and Dauntless from “Hope and Fear” — and more intelligently incorporate design elements that would speak to the Katana class’s lineage — namely, those seen on the Sovereign class.

(Side note: Mark Kingsnorth went on to revisit his original take on Sternbach’s design, which has gained quite a bit of notoriety as the Insignia class.)

So far, I have been focusing on locking down a completely new approach to the aft saucer, taking a lot of cues from the Sovereign lines on the dorsal surface and trying to more closely match the Dauntless lines on the ventral surface. I’ve been doing a lot of quick, rough renders and mock-ups, then painting over them with my Wacom tablet in Photoshop to explore different lines and arrangements. I’m using the player-made blueprints as a starting point for scaling, but not treating them as sacrosanct the way I did for the 2003 model. The following images show the evolution of the model from Jan 9 through to today.

Saucer design exploration, focusing on the flight deck and impulse area

Stardrive design exploration, emphasizing the Dauntless-esque shape.

My goal is to have the model render-complete by the end of August, 2014, which coincides with the 10th Anniversary of Coro’s last sim.

1. Albeit with a widened saucer, rather than the elongated one that Sovereign ended up with [↩]
2. An idea that would eventually manifest with Voyager’s variable warp nacelles [↩]
3. Originally featured in the Voyager episode “Hope and Fear” [↩]