As anybody who is familiar with my work knows, I love the Constellation-class. I was a kid when TNG aired and I first got a look at the ship in the episode Peak Performance. Funny side note: since I saw that episode before The Battle, I thought Picard had a model of the Hathaway in his ready room.
It’s been one of my favorite ships since then. I’ve built a couple CGI models of the ship, first a few years ago and then a couple more models after getting more references. Anywho, since I’ve switched CGI programs since I last built one, it’s time for a new model.
Due to TNG being on Blu-Ray and TrekCore having a great gallery of reference images, I’m armed with some new references of the model in HD. Peak Performance especially has some really nice shots of the models, especially some closeups with those wonderful details in rich HD. (stuff looks a lot less blurry in HD
) Unfortunately, though, not everything they did with HD Trek is to my liking. One of the best shots of the ship that shows the rear is this shot:
That’s taken from one of my regular DVDs and, unfortunately, many of the details are just too blurry to see that well. Since the piece between the impulse engines is missing now, that would be the best shot to get a look at that, if they hadn’t screwed things up in HD. This is the shot in HD:
That shot offers a wonderful look at the back of the model, or I should say the back of a model. It only took me a few seconds of looking at that to realize that’s not the studio model. It’s a frakking CGI model. And it’s inaccurate. Many of the shapes are wonky and the parts look different than they do on the studio model. And I don’t know what in the hell that crap is between the impulse engines, but it doesn’t match up with this shot from later in the episode:
That shot still has the studio model in it. Even if you haven’t studied the model like I have, you can tell it’s a physical model and not CGI because the nacelles have seams. There’s no good reason for a person to recreate seams from part joins in CGI, so that’s a sure sign it’s a real model. So, that means that shot is the best look I have at that part of the model, since the buttholes who did the HD conversion screwed things up so badly. I don’t know what happened to that other shot and why they couldn’t use the effects shot of the model from the original negatives, but that sucks. If they were going to replace it with CGI, they could have at least gotten somebody to make an accurate model of the ship.
So, anywho, I’m now armed with new references, even with that minor disappointment. I started my model with what a lot of people don’t like doing on TMP-era ships, the nacelles. I tried to make them accurate and smooth as possible, using every available reference I have of the Constellation-class. One mistake a lot of people make when building this ship is to just make them like the TMP Enterprise model’s nacelles and modify the backs. Since the Constellation-class filming model wasn’t a kitbash like the ready room model was, the parts are similar but different. After all, it’s not like they had a couple spare refit models laying around that they could (or would) cut up for parts. Those parts had to be made from scratch, so there are differences, just as there are on the Miranda-class.
So, this is what I have so far:
They’re smooth, but each nacelle weigh in at over 77K polygons. With the little bit of the ship that I’ve done, (counting that there will be four nacelles and two of those greeble-tastic pylons) I’m already over my total polygon count for my last TrueSpace model.
USS Hathaway
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