How the ship and the monolith were made...
The Ship:
It all started with an image of the voyager. Using basic objects provided by 3D Studio Max 7
and a lot of patience with proper shape transformations as well as painful object translations in 3D space, bit per bit our voyager ship started resembling what we initially envisioned. Boxes,
spheres and most often toruses and cones gave our ship a realistic look.
Initially we have put a lot of time into learning how to move entities in the user interface and learning how to do basic scene rotations, but once mastered every piece started fitting in.
Three blue "blocks" seen just under satellite have been created using three basic cylinders with twelfe sides and unsmooth surface, while the base was another but smooth flattend cylinder.
On these blocks, it can be found two eighteen sided smooth cylinders attached on the back just like the supports shown on the base of satellite bellow. Attached on the top
of the first block are two cylinders conencting the whole structure to the satellite.
The "pipes" that can be seen stretching across from the satellite, have been made by using two toruses resembling rings and eight cilindres crossing each other bounding the structure.
Twelfe such blocks were used to make our full pipe object. Two "mirrors" have been placed at the end of structure and on the sixth block to mimic the image.
The back base of the ship behind the satellite, even though appearing complicated as rendered image was actually one of the easiest parts that we constructed. It consists of eighteen sided smooth white cylinder attached to the satellite,
ten sided unsmooth tube, a sphere, eighteen eighteen sided cylinders with varrying height attaching sphere to the tube, two supports on the sides consisting of two cylinders and small flat box for each just like the ones found on three blocks described above, a flat box ressembling a square on top, and two antenas pointing in separate directions.
Building of the satellite itself presented an issue because we were unable to create such model with modifications of objects available in 3D Studio Max 7. Due to lack of tutorial on how would we build such a complex structure with this tool,
it has been to decided to change the color and hence mimic satellite's shape. Building of objects which reside on satellite was a lot easier then expected. The structure shown bellow beside the satellite was assembled with eight eighteen sided
smooth cylinders which supported flattened cylinder on top, a cone residing on this top as well as small bolt cylinder and another small cylinder found right at the end of satellite acting as "reception" magnet.
Sitting right on satellite, bellow all these described objects, were another two twenty-four sided cones.
Hardest part of building voyager was making of the top pipes which reside right on top of satellite's base. The "squared" pipes were a lot harder to build then the round ones described earlier because we found that it was to difficult to fit the small cylinder structures
that made up a single pipe block. This "block" consists of two tubes representing squared rings as well as ten eighteen sided smooth cylinders holding the block together. Eight such block make up the whole structure. On the top of this structure a weird object
resides to mimic the one found on the top of the image. This object was another structure which quite difficult to assemble due to precission of its components.
It consists of twelfe very different (eighteen and thirty smooth sided) cyliners with varrying widths, heights and lengths, as well as five boxes with similar modifications. Under this object, on the pipes, four other modified, translated and scaled boxes along with
four triangle and sexagon shaped cylinders finalize the desired look of our satellite's top structure.
Bellow is the shot of our full voyager ship in 3D Studio Max 7. If you like what we have done and if you would like .max file to play with and do your own modifications and extensions, feel free to let us now and we will be glad to provide you with a copy.
The Monolith:
Modeling the monolith was incredibly easy compared with modeling of the voyager spaceship described above. However drawing Professor Ross' trademarked "3P98 horse" proved to be lot more complicated in 3D Studio Max 7 using available 2D drawing tools.
Once this has been complete and precisely translated on the monolith colored box, the final result was a lot better then we initially hoped for.
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