3D Animations

This is the other side to some of the 3D work in development - animations. These are a collection a reasonably basic but cool (I think) 3D animations of various Trek ships - stills of which can be seen here.

Animating these ships is a completely different ball game to simple stills. I've only occasionally experimented with animations in the past, and don't take it too seriously. A little fun sequence of a completed mesh is fine, but I haven't the wherewithal to compile large and exciting scenes with explosions, phasers firing and other special effects, as yet. I could do it if I really wanted to, but it's a lot of work. Perhaps eventually. Here though is a few of the basic animations I've completed to date.

The thumbnail previews only show a frame of the movie, and do not reflect actual canvas size...

A Constitution Class ship entering the Sol system?? The quality is okay, although on the original rendering you can clearly see the bussard collectors spinning round, as they're meant to. It's a little harder to see here with the compressed clip, but it's there.... With this clip comes a common piece of familiar TOS incidental music

A much more basic clip here, this in fact started out as a test animation for the spinning bussard collectors.

This is one of the reasons I wanted to start doing animations. I think we would all liked to have seen a fleet of ships from the Original Series, and not one merely limited to Constitution Class ships. You may wonder why on earth I've put a Daedalus-like ship in here. Well, I wanted to, simple as that, just to embellish it. This is the early (non canon) starship Pioneer Class, of my own design. But this is not meant to be a simulation of canon at all. The Daedalus itself was supposedly decommissioned about 50 years before the Constitution was launched, but there's nothing to say that ships with spherical primary hull configurations aren't still going to be about in the TOS era, in one shape or another. The Olympic, after all, is a good example of latter day starships hailing from the Daedalus Class design lineage. One day, when I've built a few more 22nd century ships I'll do a fleet formation of Daedalus era vessels (yeh, alright, maybe an NX-Class might be in there as well...)

This was a pain to do actually, after several attempts I still couldn't get the lighting quite as I'd like it. But it's adequate.

This is the ASDB Merced Class ship making it's animation debut, alongside the Nebula Class USS Bristol. The only slight problem with it is a quirk of the camera's movement which I didn't initially pick up when doing various wire-mesh previews in Lightwave. These kinds of animations take several hours to fully render, so I haven't yet bothered to redo it. It's not a serious fault, the camera seems to 'bounce' slightly as the ships fly past. It's still quite nice though, although a tad dark - the stars only barely visible in the background, something which degraded a little when I compressed it. The captured music, by the way, initially belonged to a scene from TNG's 'Redemption part II'.

This is now the fifth version of this sequence, and anyone who downloaded the old version will remember there were a few things I wanted to tidy up. So I tried several times to improve certain areas, such as detail to the New Orleans as it flies past, sprucing up the Constellation a bit, and the Cheyenne, and adding fractal noise to the windows to give the impression of shade and shadow, bits and pieces like that. Also, two ships have been added bringing up the rear, a type-1 Nebula Class, and a Freedom Class Light Cruiser, bringing the fleet total to 18. Also, a gas giant planet is in there too, way back in the distance, about ten thousand kilometres from the camera (obviously it'd be much further than that in real space ;).

And if anyone wants to point out that Excelsior variant Hokule'a Class that flies past is missing its name and registry, I know! It's a separate mesh object to the ship, and its inclusion totally passed me by. I didn't notice this oversight until it was too late!

So this was the fifth revision, and I hope you'll agree it's an improvement. Owing to the previous problem I had of finding a audio clip of suitable music long enough I've added blank noise at the beginning of the clip, so it's silent for the first couple of seconds, then the music fades in. It was the only way around the problem I could find.

I've redone this one, this time though with my 'reasonable' Galaxy Class mesh, which makes it a more interesting and structured fleet, as the Galaxy is primarily a Capital ship. The rest of this clip is the same as the last -slightly altered lighting though.

Hehehe, seeing as I was asked the names of the ships, just for fun, here they are...

1st Galaxy	USS Columbia	NCC 71803
2nd Galaxy	USS Premier	NCC 74667
3rd Galaxy	USS Trinculo	NCC 71867
Proto-Nebula type	USS Dionysus	NCC 71420
Type 1 Nebula	USS Horizon	NCC 60831
Type 2 Nebula	USS Ukraine	NCC 60915
1st Miranda	USS Zurich	NCC 21340
2nd Miranda	USS Albany	NCC 31898
1st Cheyenne	USS Cayce	NCC 74002
2nd Cheyenne	USS Cheyenne	NCC 73531
Norway	USS Warsaw	NCC 64828
Constellation	USS Constellation	NCC 1974
1st Excelsior	USS Akron	NCC 2716
2nd Excelsior	USS Curie	NCC 34575
Merced	USS Halcyon	NCC 41683
Curry-type	USS Christie	NCC 45492
New Orleans	USS New Orleans	NCC 61008
Niagara	USS Canberra	NCC 59373
Hokule'a	USS Pascal	NCC 19390
Springfield	USS Louisville	NCC 53535
Freedom	USS Voskhod	NCC 68172

This is my first battle animation, a Cardassian Galor Class Destroyer versus the Galaxy Class. Who will win in the end!?... It's not bad in my opinion. It was quite tricky , mainly though the part where the shields of the Galaxy deflect the photon torpedoes, and they go bouncing off. This is part 1 of 2 parts, the 2nd I'm currently working on. For this first Part I had to mix three separate audio tracks: a photon launch looped twice, background music, and phaser fire from the Galaxy. It's quite intricate work getting them to synchronise perfectly with the action.

This is/was part of the ASDB movie (that was never finished - it became just too big a project, but it may yet be finished). It was set in about 2270-75, and features the 4 Nacelled Excelsior prototype. Here it flies into warp. Kinda cool!

This was the part two sequence which involved the Buran and Kyushu entering warp whilst still inside the solar system (en route to Wolf 359). It was actually filmed first, and whilst I added the sound fx and music, the animation has problems with it (such as with the camera and general lighting, etc) which were resolved in the below (unscored) edited together sequence.

This was the overall first (and only) cut test animation (edited from two separately filmed parts) that I was working on about a year ago (and which I forgot about). I drudged it up for the sake of adding it to this page, rather than gather dust for ever. I never ironed out the flaws, of which there are many, not least of which was the lack of sound effects or music. It was meant to be a sequence showing fleet manoeuvres in preparation for the rendezvous at Wolf 359, featuring a number of the obscure ship types, such as the Cheyenne Ahwahnee, New Orleans Kyushu, Proto-Nebula Melbourne, Niagara Princeton to name a few.