Home • Enterprise Blueprints • Starship Gallery • Airborne True Type Fonts • Contact

4/16/08 As promised, I've updated the Airborne font family. Minor corrections and adjustments have been made all around, a full-weight Pike-era font has been created, and the "variants" fonts have been fleshed out and renamed "Airborne Pilot" and "Airborne II Pilot." Click here to check 'em out.

4/11/08 I haven't updated the site in a while, but I've been working on a lot of projects, not the least of which is the continued updating of the model. Here's a new pic of it that came out of my experimenting with ambient occlusion (that's the smoky, overcast look you see here) and putting some swirly stuff just behind the lit windows. I've also done some subtle Photoshop work that seems to make the model look more physical and less CG.

3/15/08 The new blueprints are finally done! Go have a look at them!

3/11/08 The new blueprints are on their way. The drawings themselves are 100% done, and I've just got some minor proofing to do before I go "live" with them. Look for them on the site in about a week!

2/26/08 I'm finally finished with the B/C deck. This has easily been the most challenging part of the project so far. It's taken nearly three weeks and dozens of reworkings to get it to the point where I can live with it. There's a nearly flat part on the back end that by its nature doesn't show up in simple orthos, so it's mostly been tweak after tweak after tweak to get it to look like this.

I've actually been working behind the scenes to get the blueprints done once and for all. I've been doing a lot of five-view drawings of individual components and will be ready to release something on the site very soon.

2/14/08 I've been working on a new B/C deck (the teardrop-shaped thing on the top of the saucer), using some new reference materials. It's a much, much more complicated shape than you might think, and getting it just right is taking forever. In the meantime, dig the new nacelle domes!

2/5/08 Detailing on the underside of the saucer has been completed. I'm not sure if I'm done with texturing yet; I might eventually wind up finding a happy medium between too much weathering (as on the old model) and essentially none at all (as on this one). I'm noticing also that these test renders are looking a little flat. I think that has more to do with how I'm setting up lights than how the build and the texturing are going. For an interesting comparison between the two models, compare this image to this one, for example. I'm not sure which makes me cringe more: the peppermint candy nacelles or those blocky, blurry bitmap decals!

Speaking of decals, I couldn't take looking at the numbers on the secondary hull anymore. As I expected, they haunted me until I spent a day or two vectorizing them. In this shot, because of the low resolution, they're essentially invisible. Good thing I worked so hard on them! An interesting note that I might include in the next edition of the blueprints: after the 1991 restoration, they were replaced using a font called Machine (which was also used for the main decals in later editions of the 18-inch AMT kit). More cringing ahead: Machine was invented in 1970, three years after the show was off the air! The original decals were sort of a condensed version of the big NCC-1701 ones, with a serif added to the top stroke of the 7. Maybe I'll make a condensed version of Airborne one day.

1/30/08 Work on the bottom half of the saucer has begun. I've cut out all the new, vectorized decals and the windows around the center dome. Looking at this texture-free test render, it's amazing how I never realized how far I had gone overboard with all the streaks and weathering. (It actually looks better plain!) It's also interesting to note how anthropomorphic the design of the ship is. Getting the saucer just right gives the ship a familiar "face."

1/27/08 The secondary hull is, I think, done. For reals this time! I've also made a brand new saucer pylon. Looking at this image, I realize I still have to re-do the nacelle pylons. (I should probably pay more attention to JPEG compression levels, too.)

1/20/08 I've managed to correct all the secondary hull windows in a much quicker time frame than I thought it would take. On to extruding the windows and adjusting the textures!

1/17/08 After putting the finishing touches on the secondary hull, I took a closer look at some of my reference materials and discovered some problems that need correcting. The windows are individually a tiny bit too large, and the arrangement is not perfect. As much as I don't want to believe it, the secondary hull windows are not arranged in horizontal decks; they more or less follow the surface of the truncated cone. This is something that I would hope modern model makers would try to avoid, but I guess they let it slide back in 1964. Thus, I'm going to change both the model and the drawings to reflect what is on the 11-foot model and not what should be on it.

This is a major setback to the project and, the way I do things, will take several days to recover from. I'll update the site when I've made some measurable progress.

1/11/08 The secondary hull is essentially finished. In addition to the new hull and all the accompanying image textures, I've re-colored much of the dish area to make it look more like the TV version and less like the NASM version. I'm still tweaking textures and making minor adjustments. Unfortunately, the little black numbers are still image textures. I'm not sure if they're worth vectorizing just yet, but I'll probably eventually get sick of looking at them and go ahead and fix it.

I think I'll be taking a break from the model for a few days and concentrating my efforts on updating the blueprints. If I can stick to it, the site might have all-new blueprints in a week or so. Stay tuned.

1/4/08 I'm still working on the secondary hull. I've done all the "decals," rebuilt the shuttle bay deck (the old one was too low-poly, so I wound up getting some subtle triangle artifacts) and put another "chamfer" along the edge between the main hull and the aft ventral cutout. The purpose of the chamfer is to suggest a physical model rather that a CG one. A "real" ship would probably have a razor-sharp edge here, but I'm going for something that looks more like the Enterprise on TV and not the fictional ship. I also put subtle "collars" around the spine lights. When you stand on your tippy toes and look at the model in person, there doesn't seem to be anything but two round ports (plus the red Chiclet in between). However, sometimes you'll see a photo where there seems to be some kind of ring around the ports. Some people have even suggested very detailed cog-like collars. Here I decided to make the collars nearly invisible and build them right into the shape of the hull. (I think all this detailing and tweaking might just be my way of putting off the next step, which is extruding all those windows!)

As usual, feel free to email me at holdthefudgehotmail.com with your questions and comments.

12/31/07 I've been spending the last two weeks hammering out details on the secondary hull. This has been the most frustrating part of the project so far. Most of the time has been spent perfecting the transition around the parabola where the flat part meets the main hull. I literally made about a dozen attempts before I got it to look the way I wanted. While I was at it, I put a little "chamfer" along the edges where the hull juts out. This is a minute detail that will only show up in extreme closeups, but I like the way it looks. For the vertex snobs out there, the original hull was made up of 4,682 vertices, and this new one has 8,436 so far!

12/19/07 Work on the new stuff has been humming along nicely. I'm pretty much done updating the starboard side drawing, which of course is affecting all the other drawings little by little.

The model is also getting a big makeover. So far I've rebuilt the nacelles entirely, done a lot of work on the upper half of the saucer, and begun work on a brand new secondary hull. The changes to the drawings are necessarily being reflected on the model, and vice versa. The major issues that I'm addressing:

• Accurization in terms of size, shape and placement of windows throughout
• A more accurate bottom half to the saucer section
• Vectorized "decals" throughout
• Less intense weathering on the model

Here's a new pic of the model in progress (click to enlarge). The nacelle domes are just multiple, animated 2-D image textures for now; I'm not sure if I want to keep them like this or go back to the 3-D ones. The challenge with the 3-D version is achieving that "frosted glass" look.