I thought it might be interesting to document the story of how this crazy image got built so here goes.

Day 1.

(Primary assembly of parts).
This day was pretty straightforward as I had to collect several components from other projects into this one.

The first thing to do was to go and find the latest version of the Enterprise that I have. This was a little more of a trick than I had realized as I have updated several versions in different files. Eventually though I compiled the latest version and copied it into a separate file for manipulation.

Then I pulled up an old model I made for the engine internals. This was done a long time ago and had some raydream components.

I got rid of the outer casing I originally built for that model and constructed a whole new outer frame and ribs resulting in what we see in the final render. I learned in this process when comparing to my latest model that I do have a small taper in the engine case which I had thought I had missed. The real model (meaning the actual real model of the Enterprise in the Smithsonian) has more tapered engines than mine but I'm glad I do include that detail (albeit too subtle). The engine case was built in Amapi and I left that program in the US in storage on accident when I moved to Japan so I can't fix it now. I really regret it too because the secondary hull was also made in Amapi and I'd really like to do some major work on it. Carrara can't handle it and I'm really skeptical that Hexagon can deal with what I want. Maybe, we'll see, I'm a big chicken when it comes to learning Hexagon (why I don't know since I paid for it and all).

Then I went to my Constellation model and collected all the ribbing and internals I built for the primary hull copied them into the Enterprise model. The Constellation stuff was textured to look burned and damaged so I fixed all that to look nice.

Then I brought all that stuff together. I copied the primary hull mesh which is a spline object, converted it to a vertex object and removed several panels. Then I copied this new starship model into a new file with my new drydock model and that was the first day (took about six hours or so which included a lot of test rendering and model updating and organization).

-Kix