Shamrayev rebuild

 

Shamrayev Rebuild

As I mentioned yesterday, I am planning to build a new model of the ship that I created for my design degree. The U.S.N.S. Igor Shamrayev is a fast courier intended for a fictional film project. It's a hard science fiction design, so not Star Wars or Star Trek, something with plausible propulsion technologies and no artificial gravity.  

Lets revisit the ship, the builds, and go on a whistle-stop tour of my 3D modelling history.

Design Inception

1991-92

The first model was designed and built in 1991 for my 1992 degree show. The whole project was about five weeks and involved learning to use Microstation. The university had seats for 3DS, but this was pre-Max and pre-running on Windows. It looked crude by comparison, although it was probably a better tool for this job. Microstation is a precise, engineering-focused 3D CAD application - perfect for product design. Still, its strengths simply wouldn't come into play when designing a low-detail object that is about 200m long. I do remember one of my colleagues on the course saying he liked the design but thought the crew habitat looked like a bottle of washing-up liquid. That was intended as a modeller-making Easter egg, given how all the Star Wars ships had bits from Airfix tank and battleship models on them. Cool, but not good design!

trueSpace-era

After finally getting a PC of my own, I rejoined the 3D modelling club after getting a copy of TrueSpace 1 on the cover of a magazine. Remember those, fellow old person? I was so excited by the prospect that I soon used a windfall of about £300 to pick up a copy of the newly released TrueSpace 2.0

TrueSpace was unlike any other 3D software. It was strongly UI driven, when most tools felt like CAD. Building models was fun, though it had limitations; it took years for them to impact most users. I was very sad to learn that trueSpace creator, Caligari, had shut its doors. A casualty of the Microsoft acquisition as it grasped for a 3D builder of its own.

Built in trueSpace 5/6, probably in 1998-9

The trueSpace version was only a little more detailed than the original, but we're talking  Windows 97-era with 16MB of system memory and 4MB of VRAM. 

Max Power

A few years later (2000s), I found myself helping to create a potential TV project (The Master Squadron). I was a 3DS Max user! I had a seat for version 4, although I never really learned how to use it properly.

I liked some of the design changes. Those sails look more structural and plausible, but could be so much more realistic-looking. The crew's hab is a double-hull that counter-spins, although the ship's propulsion system can accelerate continuously at up to nearly 1g. Hence, the crew enjoy simulated gravity through high acceleration. You don't need spin habs, you need a big ladder running the length of the ship because it's like a 200 m-high tower with the engines at the bottom and the command module at the top.

I'm not sure how I feel about this, now. Space vehicles in my Orbital Elements game use (near) continuous acceleration to simulate gravity. Having a small spin habitat might be helpful when the ship is coasting or in orbit.

3DS Max was a powerhouse, and I was, the whole time, tinkering in the evenings and sometimes at weekends. I wasn't driven, and I could go months without touching it.

Blender (first-bash)

This was built in 2018, some 10 years after the 3DS version. It's a lot more detailed overall because we're now running Blender. Ha! That said, having done a good job of bringing the command section into a more "SCI-FI" futuristic style, the rest of the ship wasn't all that different and, really, quite crude. This time I plan to go back to the formula and do a lot more reinterpretation, reimagining and a whole lot more detail.

I had intended to do a big animation fly-past, like the one I created for my degree show. Alas, the design looked shockingly bad when I tried to light it. My space lighting was rubbish, and, in fact, after downloading the file and testing in Blender 5.0, I see I made the classic mistake of not building the ship to scale, so the lighting would not behave correctly. Notice that I put an angel statue on the command centre's roof to show that the ship is about half to a quarter scale. 

These days, I have more time and patience. I can really go to town on the details. *Rubs hands in glee*