It’s been a long time since I started a wip thread in this forum, and so many of the names and faces have changed! But I’ve been lurking around every once in awhile and am always impressed by the amazing talent that has thrived here over the past couple of years. I’ve been busy with other projects (and life in general!) but I’ve been feeling the urge to make another starship. Well, the itch has become unbearable and its time to scratch it. As some of you may already know, I made a Constitution class refit model a couple of years ago using 3ds max that worked out rather well. And I’ve always been a fan of the movie era designs, so in line with this, I have chosen the Miranda class (USS Reliant) from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn as my subject. It hasn't been modeled much that I’m aware of, and I think I'll be able to do her justice.

My weapon of choice will be Maya 6 for this project and I've decided to create this model using NURBS. A lot of people shy away from NURBS modeling which is too bad because they are indeed quite powerful. But they are time-consuming and sometimes a pain to work with. Also their slower to render and harder to texture, so there’s a lot of good arguments for modeling straight to polygons. However, I want the scalability and precision which NURBS offers which is why I will not use box modeling or subd's. So when I'm done I can tessellate the model to a LOD that I require which will be more flexible in the long run.

My intention here is NOT to make this a tutorial, but rather just to show my thought processes and illustrate the various ways parts can be constructed. A lot of folks like to model by perfecting each component one at a time before moving on to the next component. I don’t work like that, as I find that you can paint your way into a corner that way. My work flow is similar to how you would sculpt in real life. Rough it out, examine, refine, and repeat as needed.

So anyways, let’s get started and have some fun!

Jason

PS There’s lots of screencaps of the Miranda Class (USS Reliant) over at trek5.com:
https://www.trek5.com./caps/films/02_khan/index.html