My first Enterprise

After modeling the Romulan Warbird from TOS I want an Enterprise to go with it. Made some headway on the deck so construction is underway….

Link to the Warbird pic here…
Warbrid Picture

There is an icon in the center, above and below the picture, click that for the full size picture.

RAID’s work!

A few days ago my mouth went dry, panic began to well up inside of me. I store all my graphic assets on a network drive so I can access them from multiple computers. It’s been great for the last couple of years. I got the 1 TB unit on sale at Best Buy for $230 and set it up as a RAID 1, which mirrors your data on two internal drives.

Sunday it took FOREVER to access a file. I ran the disk manager and the DRIVE A FAILED message chilled my soul. Every model I’ve ever made was on that drive. Every render I’ve done. Assets and tutorials I paid more money than my wife knows about, all on that drive.  With not much confidence I told the unit to copy everything to my system hard drive. In theory, everything was on drive b, just not efficiently, the auto backup is the whole point of a RAID 1 setup.

IT WORKED!!!!! It took 24 hours, but it’s all safely on another drive, two other drives actually, and a replacement raid drive is on it’s way. Ahhhhhhh……

New model

A new model I’ll be adding to the free stuff link on the right. It’s a lightwave model, needed a tablet for a render and didn’t have one. Let me know if you use it, or any other feed back.

BOP Image ready

Spent a few hours with Paint Shop Pro. Grabbed the image from the schematics of the ship. cleaned it up and gave it the right orange color. Looks pretty good, hopes are high.

UV or not to UV?

Well, I’m making a real effort to understand UV mapping, instead of just using them and being amazed it worked. I’m watching the basic uv mapping videos from kurv studios. A lot of great info, but some really weird stuff as well. Weight maps, layers and additional geometry to make a uv you can’t see unless you render instead of just making new surface? Really? But I am picking up quite a bit. Then I figured out how to use the PLG uv plugin. Why newtek doesn’t buy this one and throw it in the box I’ll never know. (maybe not even buy, just ask?) Really makes atlas mapping easy compared to the standard tools! Now, back to the warbird model….

Updated Bird of Prey

BOP

Romulan BOP

Here is a WIP of my current model, the Romulan Bird of Prey, seen in Star Trek. (The original series) The episode was Balance of Terror, one of my favorites, hence the choice. The mesh is getting there, still have some detailing to do and some clean up, then it’s on to texturing. I’ll post progress reports, I’m still a newbie when it comes to the textures, but I have some new plugins that might help with the UV’s.

Lightwave Core

Lightwave 9.6 is out and NewTek is hawking Lightwave Core. (Most are refering to it as LW10 of course.) It looks like the days of free point releases are going away, replaced by a subscription.

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