Haven Design

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Captain Silverado
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Haven Design

Post by b-guy »

I'm gonna put these in links, as they're 1080 and probably won't fit right in the forum window...

http://www.khobrah.net/silver/shippics/ ... de%201.jpg
http://www.khobrah.net/silver/shippics/ ... de%202.jpg
http://www.khobrah.net/silver/shippics/ ... de%203.jpg
http://www.khobrah.net/silver/shippics/HavenOrbit.jpg

I guess it's painfully obvious that I've been working on this for a long time. First started around January 2008, I think. The deseign was inspired by two sources: The watch my parents had given me when I was 18 and Stargate Atlantis. The shape came from the watch...but Atlantis inspired the rest. More specifically, everything that I felt was wrong with the city.

1) If the shield fails, everybody dies. I was actually staring at my watch when I starting thinking 'hmmm...the crystal face is like a dome...you could put a tiny little city in there!'
2) It's a city. People should want to live there. Trees, grass, water, parks, all the comforts of home. Atlantis, while looking very cool, is too much of a spaceship. This is why Haven's interior isn't 100% full of buildings, and those areas that are empty have greenspaces instead of sheet metal.
3) It's a city and a space station. There should be extensive docking and support facilities, up to and including facilities for building new stuff. Hence the shipyards.
4) Supership. C'mon, a two-mile city and you're telling me it can fly between galaxies running on little tubes the size of a Canadian-sized bottle of Vodka? Nope! This is why Haven needed so much power from the planet just to get into orbit. And no intergalactic super-drive.

So those were the original ideas. I had thrown around the possibility of having rivers running down into the lake, and even modeling a little RMC campus to hide in the city. But that proved to be too much work.

Speaking of too much work, the basic design of the city was finished fairly quickly. It was all the frickin' buildings that took forever! Not only that, I redid the all the building textures twice.

The original, crappy textures looked like this:
http://www.khobrah.net/silver/shippics/ ... wntown.jpg

These are clearly horrible. I don't remember what I was thinking. Maybe they were intended as temps? So I tried doing some random noise stuff, which was a bit better.
http://www.khobrah.net/silver/shippics/ ... wntown.jpg

But still not right. FInally I started actually modeling little building interiors, which proved too time consuming. So I switched to using pictures of my parent's house and my old aparment, with the colours messed up and such. That satisfied me.

http://www.khobrah.net/silver/shippics/ ... xtures.jpg

Next was smaller details. The bridges over the lake and the trees went in, there then was a LOT of experimenting with smaller details like glow, and reflections. You'll see in the water and the windows of the final version in the video that all the city windows reflect what's around them. Of course, it didn't all work easily...but some of the blunders were kinda cool:

http://www.khobrah.net/silver/shippics/powerup30028.jpg

Hmmm...what else. Detailed the shipyards, and fixed the hanger doors so they matched the hanger bay design, which you've all seen. Most of the rest came in doing the video, which I'll comment on in another thread. Streetlights were a late addition; they were originally just glowing particle sphere's stuck to the streets...but I found out that when I moved the city, the sphere's wouldn't go with it! So I added in real lights, which I thought looked great, the way the properly illuminated the ground around them.

I can't believe I actually named this test shot 'city final'. Ohhh, so much came after it.

http://www.khobrah.net/silver/shippics/cityfinal2.jpg

So...what did you think?
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Re: Haven Design

Post by Star Traks »

b-guy wrote:...I can't believe I actually named this test shot 'city final'. Ohhh, so much came after it.

http://www.khobrah.net/silver/shippics/cityfinal2.jpg

So...what did you think?
Just one observation on test shot 'city final' from working on countless community theatre sets.
Set designs are rarely 'final'; perhaps a term like continuous evolution would be more appropriate.
CAD software would had helped in previous set designs - considerable time was spent designing and building manually. Either way [CAD or manually] such work is a labor of love.

Nice update with texture change.
May I suggest one item carried from your Vimy class - consider whether or not Haven shows weapon and/or engine ports. [DS9 did show engine and weapon ports].

Take care
Distant Origin 3.23 Saurian Professor Gegen: It wasn't an invasion. We were on a field expedition to learn more about your species. We meant no harm. I'm a molecular paleontologist.
Chakotay: [referring to injury] Do you always harpoon the local wildlife?
Captain Silverado
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Re: Haven Design

Post by b-guy »

The city does show engine ports on the underside...you can't see them in these shots. I'll render an image to throw up later. Weapons...well. I was going to add them, but decided I really liked the smooth finish of the outer rim disc. Not sure where they'd go...
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Makin' Traks
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Re: Haven Design

Post by borgcrazy »

Nicely done.
One idea I've always liked for weapons is hiding them under sliding panels. When the weapons aren't needed, you have a smooth, unbroken hull, but when you need to shoot something, suddenly the hull looks like a blowfish!
This has the added benefit of fooling enemies into thinking the city is an easy target ("Look, they're unarmed!") if the residents can mask the weapons ports from scanners. The enemy swoops in, gets a pounding and (hopefully) scurries away with their proverbial tails between their legs.
Captain Silverado
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Re: Haven Design

Post by b-guy »

As promised, a view of Haven's thrusters, taken from the launch video. I would have preferred a radial, spoke design for them, as used in the antigrav 'springboard' that helped push the city out from under the sand, but that would have been too much like Atlantis.

Image
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