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
Overall they’re better, so I’ll use these to get started, and to rough things out. However, I will stop using them as reference pretty early on and rely almost entirely on either prop photos or movie/tv screencaps.
