How do you make a Federation (star trek) texture?

Discuss the Star Trek mod(s) for the Vega Strike Engine

Moderators: tillias, Jennos, peteyg

Post Reply
Jack Cloudy
Explorer
Explorer
Posts: 15
Joined: Tue Oct 11, 2005 6:58 am

How do you make a Federation (star trek) texture?

Post by Jack Cloudy »

Hope the title was good enough and I placed it at the right place. I have made a Federation ship for this story I'm trying to write. Problem is, Federation ships always had this lovely detailed textures and I am a plain idiot when it comes down to that. Here's a picture of the ship, and as you can see, whatever I allready did texture looks crap. So, does anybody have any tips on how to make a more star trekkish texture? Thank you.
Oh yeah, in case you are wondering, the ship isn't exactly 100% Federation, it is a hybrid.

Image
,,That was the worst and most boring movie I’ve ever seen. Lousy special effects.
chuck_starchaser
Elite
Elite
Posts: 8014
Joined: Fri Sep 05, 2003 4:03 am
Location: Montreal
Contact:

Post by chuck_starchaser »

I'm a rank beginner at texturing, but I'd think that for startrek ships you'd want a brushed metal base look, and lots of windows. I've only textured one ship, but I can tell you, if you're not using it already, Gimp is the way to go. You can make a brushed metal base by starting with a grey texture, adding a bit of noise, and using motion blur. Then you can create a separate texture with a white background and all the windows in black and you blend it with the first texture in multiply mode, so now you have brushed metal with black windows. Next you can create yet another texture with random, diffuse blobs of white, yellow, orange and red colors, to use for internal lights. You take your white and black texture again, invert it so that background is black and windows are white, and you blend it with the internal lights texture, again, multiplicatively. So now you'll have a texture mostly black but with windows of random colors. You can use this texture as your basis for the glow texture; you might want to darken the windows quite a bit, and add bright external lights to it. Once you're getting good results and want to try more advanced stuff, check-out this thread:
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... php?t=5087
I had this collection of trekky art in my hard drive; I don't remember where I got them or whether any of it is copyrighted, though...
http://www.deeplayer.com/dan_w/goodies/ ... %20art.zip
Jack Cloudy
Explorer
Explorer
Posts: 15
Joined: Tue Oct 11, 2005 6:58 am

Post by Jack Cloudy »

Well, it’s been a while since my last post. I followed chuck_starchasers advice and it worked out pretty well, so thank you. I made a few modifications to the model, most notably new warp nacelles and SARFs (more on that later). I took some more pics and thought it would be nice if I actually explained what this ship is. So I hereby proudly present:

Corona class Tactical Interceptor:

The Corona class Tactical Interceptor is a hybrid based on Federation and Kendjarr (don’t bother searching the web, the Kendjarr is a race I came up with during lunch and I’ll be really surprised if they already exist.) technology and was secretly build in a small dock in the middle of the Utopia Planitia Shipyard (no one will look for a state of the art, top secret ship in the middle of the busiest shipyard of the Federation.)

Tactical Interceptor means that it is meant to take out specific targets during large battles. It comes in real fast (warp as a minimum) and stops at point-blank range in a blind spot of the target and lets rip with every gun it has. This can be a real morale buster if it does this to the flagship of an enemy fleet.

The Corona is based around two principles, firepower and speed. Everything else is sacrificed for that. So it’s shields are quite weak, but it isn’t supposed to stay around for very long anyway.

The firepower consists of several small phaser arrays on the saucer, none on the engineering hulls or the neck. The phaser arrays are class X and also equipped with overload capacitors. (This enables the Corona to charge up one huge phaser blast. It looks pretty similar to a normal phaser shot, but the two points of light are being followed by more points of lights like the wagons of a train and they converge in the middle as a really big ball of light before firing. This takes a while. Rather useless but sounds cool.)

It also carries two quantum torpedo launchers underneath the saucer. (hey, if the Defiant can have those, then why not a top secret super ship?)

The last two guns are the two Solid Beam Cannons placed on the inside of the two *teeth* at the front of the saucer. (Solid Beams are a Kendjarr technology and are basically the same as phasers, disruptors and all those other nice energy weapons, but the beams are more powerful, purple and also provide a PHYSICAL force against the target. Not just hot cutting beam of death, no this is hot sledgehammer cutting beam of death. :twisted: )

It also has an indirect offensive weapon, the SARFs (Sublight Automated Replicated Fighter)
These are placed on the saucer and are the main reason why the Corona carries several small phaser arrays instead of one large. (the real reason is that my attempts at one large didn’t work out, but this sounds cooler). While incapable of warp flight, they are very dangerous during battles fought at slower than light speeds. They are the size of a big shuttle but, since they don’t need all those fancy systems that keep an organic pilot in one piece, they have better armour, better weapons and are generally more manoeuvrable. (higher reaction speed) And the biggest advantage is that they can be replicated.

Now defense. The Corona has the usual Federation bubble shield and something called adaptive armour. (This is NOT like the Borg. You can adapt to a phaser nicely, but that Klingon disruptor is going to cut through it like paper. In short, you can adapt to one thing or several things if you are lucky, but not everything at once.) The shields are pretty weak though, but as I said, it is supposed to warp in, blow things up and warp out.

Now, engines. The Corona has got four fancy green impulse engines (two on the saucer’s neck, two on the engineering hulls) It also has got two warp cores and four warp nacelles. The Corona is capable of achieving slightly above average speeds but can maintain maximum warp longer than most ships because it can use one pair of nacelles and switch over to the other pair when the stress gets too high. The real use of the Warp nacelles is the Starglide system. (The upper nacelles will work together with the lower nacelles to create two vertical waves on which the ship will *surf*. Not as fast as Borg transwarp, but it comes pretty close and can be maintained for ten hours.)

That’s just about it for the exterior. Now the Interior. The Corona has got five crewmembers including the captain and is highly automated. The seats on the bridge have got seatbelts and something I call a psylink which allows the crew to control the ship with their minds. It has nice facilities for the crew, no room for passengers, a small cargo bay, one hangar that can replicate shuttles and no personal transporters (Kendjarr have got this religious fear for being taken apart and reassembled somewhere else).

And since a ship isn’t complete without a cloak and I think I read somewhere that the Federation isn’t allowed to have a cloak I came up with a not so sneaky solution. Instead of the gravity bubble used by the Romulans, the Corona makes use of tons of different systems which includes some hologram emitters on the hull to become invisible or pretend to be another ship (such as an Intrepid). While not as effective against high power scans as a Romulan cloak, it is pretty decent.

Well that wraps it up I guess, time for the pictures.


Image
Here’s a view of the Corona in all its glory, notice the two SARFs on the saucer, there are two more on the bottom.
Image
A pic of the front. This shows the three navigational deflectors.
Image
The side, not much to say about this one.
Image
And a view from the rear, giving you a nice view of its unconventional impulse placement.
Image
And here’s a close-up of one of the SARFs. I have to admit the colouring went a bit wrong, but you won’t see that if you look from further away.
,,That was the worst and most boring movie I’ve ever seen. Lousy special effects.
Post Reply