When a reader told me that I had never run any views of Rick Sternbach’s masterpiece, I was certain that they were wrong. But they weren’t! Better late than never, and fresh baked this very morning, one of the earliest CG Star Trek models ever – The U.S.S Voyager... enjoy!
Screencaps courtesy of Jörg. Some of these are the physical model. Fight it out!
Beautiful. I love those renders, they’re much better than trying to squint at screen caps. As for the caps, the first is CGI for sure, the next 4 or 5 are the physical model, I’m not sure on some of the others. It’s easy to tell on the 1st one if you look at the saucer edge that it’s CGI, and a bunch of those others I mentioned are from Season 1, before they had a CG model.
For me it’s usually the warp nacelles or the deflector dishes that are a giveaway (and sometimes the navigation lights). The physical models usually have imperfections in the lighting that isn’t present in the CGI model. (This is especially evident if you compare shot #4 with the physical model to shot #8 with the CGI model.)
The reason I mentioned the saucer edge is because the textures are a little stretched there. But, you’re right about the lights.
evil_genius_180, you’ve got a sharp eye. Most people don’t notice the texture distortion on the hull. There are several other tells that it’s the CG model.
The lines along the back of the primary hull aren’t straight on the CG model. They curve upwards at the back (same deal with the main phaser strip). They should all be parallel from the side view.
Also, the front sensor array goes up slightly higher on the CG model, and the distance between the bridge module and the captain’s quarters window is much longer on the CG model.
Also, the outside curve surrounding the main deflector is a little crooked in places and not smooth like the physical model.
If you get close enough, you’ll also notice that the texturing on the top of the warp nacelles is a bit off too. The panel around the starfleet logo should be the width of the raised section, but it’s thinner on the CG model.
And the rear landing strip lip is flat and angled on the CG model. On the physical model it was more rounded off.
Another way to tell is that in later seasons they started to add a soft blue light from the deflector dish that lights up the underside of the hull beautifully. You can see it in the second last screenshot. You can also see a red glow from the impulse engines in one of these screenshots. I don’t believe the light was done in the same pass on the physical model, so you don’t get that subtle interactive lighting.
So here’s my verdict on the screenshots-
1 – CG (the texture distortion on the hull edge)
2 – real (the sensor array and distance between the bridge and window, plus I know it’s from the pilot)
3 – Real? (The deflector looks smooth and the aeroshuttle looks real rather than bump mapped, so I say real, but it has a plasticy look to it too.)
4 – CG (the curved lines on the main hull + the interactive impulse engine light)
5 – CG (the bridge to window distance is long, and the sensor array goes too far back)
6 – real (reverse of above reasoning, plus the rounded edge of the sensor array)
7 – real (the roughness and detail of the lighting)
8 – CG (the interactive blue light, the darker torpedo launchers)
9 – CG (the curved lines on the hull, the interactive lighting from the bigger windows)
10 – real (the lighting)
11 – CG (the rougher shape of the curve around the deflector, the interactive blue light, the details in the windows)
12 – CG (the smoother lighting, and the sharper curve of the back section)
But hey, I’m certainly not insulting the CG model. Voyager is one heck of a detailed and difficult ship to duplicate, and I am still amazed at how good it looks on screen. But when you’ve been staring at it modeling it for 2 months, you tend to notice every little difference between the physical and CG models!
Thanks for the orthos, Doug! Voyager is my favourite Trek ship because of its uniqueness compared to other Trek ships, and the way the hull lines all flow so well. The ship has a lot of character.
It seems obvious that I haven’t studied her as closely, but I agree with your verdicts, except maybe the last one. Maybe it is just the angle that is very similar, but that looks to me like one of the stock shots that was around since season one and which I don’t think would have been done in CG.
Andreas, I think you’re right that is one of the stock shots that was around from almost day 1. But I believe that a few of their early stock shots were CG, especially for the warp shots. Parallax has a couple, if I’m not mistaken. But it’s a dark picture, so I could be wrong. If you brighten up the picture (in Photoshop or similar program), it looks like the small rear facing phaser strip is angled upwards, and the lights and escape pod hatches just behind that look noticeably higher up than on the physical model.
The fact that we can even still debate CG vs real is a sign of the quality of Trek’s early CG.
Okay. I didn’t think proper full CG shots started to appear until about season 3 or 4.
Funny that, since it’s usually quite easy to spot the difference, primarily from the colors and the lighting. It seems like it’s mostly the early CG shots that are difficult to discern from the model.
You’re mostly right. It was around season 3 or 4 before they started entirely replacing the weekly new footage with CG, but there was the occasional bit of CG before that. It just wasn’t too often.
Maybe the later stuff was easier to spot because they tried pushing the boundaries more and used it more often? The earlier stuff seemed to be mostly distant shots of Voyager, but later on they got really close with it.
The CG sequence from the last shot was recycled over and over again. Rather unfortunate, since the shadow settings are wrong and around the left tip of the Shuttlebay cut-out there’s light “leaking through”.
Pugnacious, yet elegant. A great design for a ship that had to be all things at once.
Rick Sternbach is one of the many reasons why this franchise has held my adoration for so many years. Some great stories, told in an environment created by artists who think things through.
I initially had a hard time getting in to Voyager because I didn’t understand why TNG went off the air. I had thought it was because they wanted to make way for Voyager (learned otherwise later). I really do love this ship design. There is a subtle elegance to her. Sleek in design, a character like Tom Paris was the perfect pilot for her!
God I love the Intrepid-Classall the curves in the right places. Not only that but it looks sporty, sleek and elegant.
Cool. Really love seeing these CG ship layouts.
Thanks for putting them up – looks like it’s been a busy day here!
Actually it was the first time they used CG ships/objects in a mostly realistic way.
Apart from the Genesis sequence one of the earliest instances was the sparsely detailed CG Enterprise in a distance shot in “The Ensigns of Command” (TNG’s 3rd season).
More detailed effects came much later, like the comet in the DS9 opening and the alien library in “Masks” (TNG’s 7th season).
Well, that was a nice surprise to wake up to this morning. It’s a pity the roller-coastering texture maps never got fixed to match the grid alignments of the five foot model, but fortunately they didn’t call attention to themselves in most moving shots.
Rick
Rick! I genuflect to thee, Sir!
Rick,
There was also the issue that, back then, LW didn’t have UV mapping…(pre-6.0 days).
Matt
I was reading somewhere that one way of telling which was the actual physical model of the ship versus the CGI was the lights on the aft body of the ship (windows and so forth), which were not installed due to the space taken up by the motors that were used to change the nacelle position for warp speed. Any truth to this?
Is there a dorsal shot of the ship?
The aft lounge area was not lit in the physical model, correct; the motor equipment took up a lot of that volume. That one easy way to tell if it was a CGI ship was to see the lit aft windows below the shuttle landing deck. -R
Kinda similar to the Galaxy.
The CG model from Generations was textured using photographs. Rob Bonchune’s Nebula which was build from this continues this omission. And the physical models themselves didn’t have a lit saucer rim either. The only screen-used D that actually has some of those windows lit is Gabe Koerner’s baby.
a great ship, one tough girl.
Terry
Hey amazing job but why didn’t you do the top and bottom views?
Holy cow! You’re right! I’m sure I rendered at least the top! I’ll look into it when I get home from work!
Beautiful design and an awesome CG model! – All those little details are really cool!!
I remember reading an interview with Rick Berman back in the day in one of the monthly sci-fi mags which made mention of the relative ease in which the Babylon 5 series appeared to be kicking out these massive scale battles, using fleets upon fleets of CG-ships (pretty much every other week!) suggesting that the show had possibly gone some ways to turning up the pressure on the Star Trek FX staff to bite the bullet and commit to similar approaches.
Mister Berman was apparently in no hurry to embrace CG until what, 1997(?) siting reservations on a computers abilities to reproduce the levels of quality and realism boasted by the physical models!
For one of Star Trek’s first CG commitments, I’d judge the craftsmanship of this baby to be nothing short of outstanding; it still looks good now!
And of course Star Trek Generations was waaay back in 1995 wasn’t it; I always thought the talents-that-be did a great job on the CG-Enterprise-D – Star Trek’s first CG-hero ship!!
Cheers!!
I can’t wait to see what Voyager looks like after her relaunch refit.
It’ll be interesting to compare the original ortho blueprints, five footer model photos, and CGI ship to see about establishing a “true” Intrepid class ship, and then perhaps tackle the fifteen interior decks. I did some of the deck layouts for Activision long ago, so there was a start, and from a structural standpoint it all seemed to work. I might get into that in the off hours (wait…what are those?) after my current assignment.
That sounds like a very interesting blog/pictorial entry . . . . . !
Chris – Let’s just say I’m doing what I love doing, coming up with stuff nobody’s seen before. And a few things that are familiar. More later on.
Actually, a Voyager breakdown would be interesting; I’m sure that’s what you meant. I’m a bit wonky from too much eyeballs on the screen today.
I (and I am sure MANY others) am (are) totally interested in seeing both!!
That’s what I meant. I am always wonky as these days I have to wear silly red/green glasses while looking at my computer screen . . .
…A Voyager breakdown? Didn’t that happen at least once every other episode?
Doug actually you have featured Voyager (if not here somewhere) because its the version shown o the Ships of the line book. Pretty sure its from here as it does say in the lower left hand corner drex files.
Wonderful!
One question: In the front and the aft view it looks like there is a distortion in the CGI model. The saucer edge is still straight, but the decks above it have a strange curvature (visible in the grid lines and the phaser strips). Is this an imperfection in the model (of the kind that is tolerable because we usually don’t see the ship head on), or is it deliberate? (It could be a distortion left over from “Twisted”, of course
).
From what I understand, the five foot filming miniature was photographed to produce the surface texture maps, the CG model was built by Santa Barbara Studios, and the projection of the maps onto the CG polygons didn’t match exactly. If anyone has better info, please chime in. The shield grid lines and phaser strips, as well as the SIF field reinforcement strips, should be absolutely horizontal as they were in the model. Tony Meininger and his Brazil Fabrication crew set up the hull perfectly straight on a flat surface and “walked” a scriber around to get the deck levels/grid lines. My guess is that the model photography introduced some kind of distortion; maybe it wasn’t shot from a long enough distance away.
Rick
Because the hull texture was simply mapped with a top down projection, the geometry would need to perfectly match the physical model for the lines to be exactly horizontal. This is also why the lines curve upwards towards the back of the saucer section. The physical model dips in considerably there, but because it doesn’t dip on the cg model, everything ends up higher than it should be.
I can’t recall exactly, but something in the back of my brain says that the physical model was laser scanned and then cleaned up, as well as photographed for the texture maps. Perhaps the errors were compounded that way. I’ve seen fan-produced Voyager CG models that don’t have the same problems as the photo maps, but have their own peculiarities in being off in the proportions of some parts. Some are quite good, I have to say.
It’s interesting to work with some of these imaginary vessels to try and synthesize a final set of documents based on blueprints/sketches, models, and CG. There’s a fourth component of intent that would seem to act as a filter for the other three. Without stepping terribly far away from what was seen on-screen, I think we who dreamed a lot of this stuff up can push and pull the documentation on the scale of millimeters and say “okay, this is what it should look like.”
Rick
Speaking of which, how did you deal with the four- vs. six-footer conundrum in your official Ent-D blueprints?
Boris said: “Speaking of which, how did you deal with the four- vs. six-footer conundrum in your official Ent-D blueprints?”
To me, it wasn’t a conundrum. The six footer was the ultimate authority on pieces ‘n’ parts. I didn’t even look at the four footer.
Sounds plausible to me.
Fantastic as always Doug. Thanks for finding the time to feed our Trek addictions. Since you’ve got us thinking about the Voyager series, I think many of us would love to see the Delta Flyer featured. You’ve got my children 4 & 6 falling in love with Star Trek and computer graphics. Your helping to build the next generation of Trek fans.
Rick, is it possible that the problem of the curvy shield grid lines and phaser strips was only introduced when the Voyager CG model was remapped by Foundation Imaging after the second season? Comparing screenshots of the Season 1+2 CG model, created by Amblin, with shots of the later, final (Season 3-7) model that Doug has featured as orthos here, it seems the curvature of the strips and lines is much less pronounced and looks more like on the physical model in the first two seasons.
Seasons 1+2
http://s95.photobucket.com/albums/l142/gaghyogi49/USS%20Voyager%20CG%20model/USSVoyagerDreadnought5.jpg
Seasons 3-7
http://s95.photobucket.com/albums/l142/gaghyogi49/USS%20Voyager%20CG%20model/USSVoyagerCollective4.jpg
Jörg
Rick, is it possible that the problem of the curvy shield grid lines and phaser strips was only introduced when the Voyager CG model was remapped by Foundation Imaging after the second season? Comparing screenshots of the Season 1+2 CG model, created by Amblin, with shots of the later, final (Season 3-7) model that Doug has featured as orthos here, it seems the curvature of the strips and lines is much less pronounced and looks more like on the physical model in the first two seasons.
I have assembled screenshots here:
http://s95.photobucket.com/albums/l142/gaghyogi49/USS%20Voyager%20CG%20model/
Hmmm. Honestly, Jorg, I haven’t a clue. Once the blueprints left my desk, the “chain of custody” of the physical model and CG efforts became a big unknown to me. If it got fixed in later seasons, that’s good. I’d be willing to bet that a more perfect Voyager could probably be assembled with all the new tools in Modo or Maya or Lightwave a lot easier than the original 1994 ship. Wish I had the time to try it.
Jorg – Sorry, misread the chronology of the mapping errors. Okay, I see what you mean about the later curves. Again, I don’t have much in the way of first-hand knowledge.
Ah! If I quickly switch back and forth between your #1 and #2 images in that group, I can really see that something got warped. Must have been a hyperspatial inverse flux monopole phenomenon.
Thanks Rick! Great to hear that I’m not seeing things here!
It would be great to be able to compare orthos of the original CG model (and maybe even the very first one created for the opening sequence) with the latest ones. The tiny rooms behind the windows, for example, also seem to be much more detailed.
Perhaps you could explain the differences in the models by simply saying it was due to the hostile conditions Voyager encountered while in the Delta Quadrant.
@Scott: Maybe the hull was deformed by the immense heat generated by Janeway’s hairdryer?
…Clearly somewhere the polarity of the neutron flow got swapped.
Oh yes. That shot from “Collective” has the distortion. I didn’t expect it to see it so clearly, but once you know what you have to watch out for…
Dumb question, you said there was a partial CG model of the Galaxy. Was there ever a full-on CGI model of the Galaxy done? Or did they not convert the Galaxy to CG?
John Knoll at ILM built one for GENERATIONS and Gabe Koerner built one for the ST Enterprise finale THESE ARE THE VOYAGES. Anybody else know of others?
There’s also the one used for the distance shot in “The Ensigns of Command”. And of course either a reuse of that model or yet another one for some LCARS animations during TNG’s run.
DS9 also had a CGI Galaxy-class, no later than “Sacrifice of Angels”, though I don’t know if that was a new build by one of the effects houses or a conversion of the Generations model.
As far I could ascertain there are four CGI-versions:
- Knolls version for Generations
- The version used in DS9 and Voyager, which was Knolls model re-rendered in LightWave at Digital Muse
- Robert Bonchune’s build, not used in any of the productions, but featured in the first of the Ship of the Fleet calendars and The Fact Files/Magazine
- Koerners model.
The supposed CGI-model in “Ensigns of Command” is heavily disputed
http://trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=85653&page=8
My personal suspision is that it is the two-footer (by the way does any-one know what became of that one?)
@Andrew: DS9 used a conversion of the Generations model.
Going back the other way, check this studio quality build of the Delta Flyer……..
http://www.therpf.com/f10/delta-flyer-st-voyager-motion-control-model-106303/
I would dare to say, it is beyond studio quality even. Stunning.
Was there a specific reason for giving Voyager two forward and two aft torpedo launchers, as opposed to only one forward and one aft as on the Enterprise-D?
I dunno; I just like torp launchers? And it looked cool? If you’re looking for an in-universe reason, there isn’t one, except perhaps to convey that Voyager was more of a fast PT boat with obvious external weaponry than a bigger ship like the D that wasn’t all about the firepower in the first place.
Rick
I think the galaxy had more torp launchers but they were covered when the saucer was docked.
There’s one additional torpedo launcher on Deck 14 in the saucer, facing aft and exposed when the battle section is not in place.
I just love seeing the CGI models and the attention to detail. It really shows how effort you guys really do for the fans.
WOW. As a long time reader first time commenter, I just hava to say WOW. That looks amazing!!! Of course everything else you post is amazing too!!! You rock!!!!
Doug,Is this the final CGI version of Voyager used in the series? The 2nd time we met you were working with Lee Stringer on an “Improved detailed” version at Fondation, is this that version? Also any chance of getting your hands on any of those CGI Galaxy class renders at least the Generations and DSN/VGR ones! And posting them on your site!
Rick, Love your beauty! Any chance you can post your original Voyager Ortho blueprints,deck layouts and deck breakdowns?
Paul F.
It’s not unusual for a hero CG model to be updated when needed (e.g., Galactica).
After VOY had finished its run Gabe Koerner refined it one more time (IIRC for an “Experience” ride) to include a modeled captains office and ready room along with more detailed sensor clusters and a few other improvements.
I was going to ask a similar question about other versions of the CG model. In the episode where they eject the warp core, and in Good Shepperd, it seems that the CG model has the panel lines modeled for close up, rather than textured on, suggesting that there were at least partial alternate versions of the model.
Hey great job
Are you going to do a rendering of the ventral side?
Can you do one like this of the Galaxy class please!
And the defiant!
V, a beauty of a vessel, no doubt!
peace & bananas | deg
Also do the Enterprise-D from All Good Things
Last time I checked the only existing CG versions of that abomination were fan-made.
Most of the fan made one are terrible there are some new one that are really good but no one seems to want to post any pic of them
Point the All Good Thing Enterprise is one of the coolest canon star trek ship yet
Beautiful! Still by far one of my top three favourite Trek ships. Still wish they’d gotten Rick Sternbach to design the JJprise.
I’ve just finished my own CG model of Voyager (not sure if you recall, but I posted the beginning progress in another post months ago).
http://www.blobvandam.com/voyager327.jpg
I’d love to get some feedback from Doug Drexler or Rick Sternbach on this. I rendered a similar view to the first pic for comparison. Rick, hopefully this doesn’t have any of the peculiarities of the other fan made models you’ve seen, and I’d say the proportions are very close to the original studio model.
That’s fantastic work, Blob!
It certainly doesn’t appear to have the roller-coastering deck lines, but then a starboard elevation ortho view would verify that.
Nice work!
Wow, it been a long time since I have seen renders of that….takes me back to my Amblin days and the sweat that went into building it with David Stipes sitting over my shoulder pointing everything out that was wrong with it.
I’m sure a lot of people would like to read your first-hand account.
Yes, one of the the elusive modellers at Amblin/Muse. Contrary to Foundation, whose modellers thankfully have proven to be a talkative lot resulting in that a lot of the CGI models have been married to their builders, this was not the case with Amblin/Muse. To date I’ve only been able to identify Ed Robison with the Nova class and David Lombardi with the proposal Enterprise-E….
Thanks Bruce for chiming in and provide us with a piece of the puzzle!
Hi, I’m trying to match the colors of the deflector dish on one of the 3D Voyager models I use, made by Sarod, and I was wondering if I could get a close up HD view of the deflector dish head on, or perhaps a gradient ramp… to match the colors… right now I’ve been using these images, but the distance, combined with the AA doesn’t give me an accurate representation of the deflectors bluish colors… again if it’s possible.
I just love this model and the renders are great.
Has anyone pointed out the biggest tell between the real model and the CGI model is that there is a whole row of windows missing on the CG model. 5 windows either side of the model on the section under the captains ready room.