Star Trek: Phase 3 was a project that I started in September of 2008, the idea was to create the U.S.S. Enterprise that would be in the 2009 movie. But there was no concept art other then a few fanfares. So I started designing my own concept of what the ship would look like based on previous Ships and concept arts I saw. In the first 4 months of designing the ship I had rendered over 60 different concepts because I keep on seeing different ideas and even more so I was watching all of the older films to get a idea of what I could take from each refit in the films.
Clip From Trailer
Later that year JJ Abrams finally released the trailer and I saw this imagine (left) and I went crazy. It was like nothing I was thinking. He keep the shape of the ship and gave it a hot rod look. This was the first time to me the ship felt real, maybe because it was fully CGI compared to the almost always mini-tures but I loved it. So I took the new look into consideration and decided to create my own ship instead of just making my own version of the Enterprise.
This is where Phase 2 was born but lasted very shortly. Since what I tried to do was combine both the model I had already created and the new look from the film it turned out ugly, but a few who where allowed to see the model actually liked it and said I should keep it when I decided to start from scratch again. So Phase 3 started, I wanted to do it like a professional. So I started by downloading dozens of star ship blue prints from the shows, as well as looking for as many imagines of the new ship. I did a contest with my friends to give me ideas for a name for the ship. I gave them a description of what I would want the name to represent. Alex Seant after a few days came up with the name “Redemption” which I fell in love with.
For more then 6 months I modeled out the ship, learning new ways to model in the process and of course going back when I found ways to improve the ship. The ship is a mix of the Original Enterprise, the Enterprise C and E and even Voyager and of course Abrams, as well as my own unique touches.
I wanted to start rendering my animations in HD but the problem is rendering in HD on my computer would take me weeks just for a 30 sec clip. So at the time it was out of the question. This video shows each phase of the project as I progressed from the original idea of creating a new Enterprise to the eventual change to creating something original. I wanted it to be more entertaining so I put some star trek music and animated the stills to go with the music.
It took awhile and finally got the set up I wanted for I can render this in at least 720p. This is the first animated scene in HD of the U.S.S. Redemption. Took a little over 16 hours to render in Blender 2.5 but it was modeled on blender 2.49b. It took about 30mins for Post Production using Sony Vegas 9. The warp effect I’m still working on, so it was edited out at the end, cause I find its not ready yet.
