I'm doing them seperately so I can more easily model the hull sections between them and so I'll have a version of the map with them seperated. I'll attach them together with MCEdit and make it available for download once I'm finished.
With the new 256 height limit and terrain generation set to flat the limit isn't a problem anymore. 236 blocks total I believe.
So after a long hiatus I've decided to finally complete my Enterprise D mega-project last seen here.
Getting the planning and the curves of the lower section just right has been very time consuming, but I have most of the difficult parts constructed or planned out by now.
To all those asking how long it took, I don't know. Certainly hundreds of hours. I started when the beta came out in late December.
The design was done by hand using a simple drawing program for drawing ellipses and planning things out, which took a lot of extra time. A lot of tweaking needed to be done to interpret the original plans and to make things like lifepods look good pixelated.
And to the token "but what about Star Wars?" guy, lots of people are doing Star Wars. Bear in mind most people here weren't even born the last time they put out anything good. Also the larger ships just aren't as interesting as a lot of others. I'd recommend B5 or other more obscure sci-fi for a large build instead.
-Current dimensions are 1066 x 784 x 100.
-Consists of about 3 million blocks.
-1.5 million square meters of floor space.
-60 km of hallways.
I'll start working on a timelapse video now using the few hundred cartograph snapshots I took. This topic will be updated with a link if that works out.
Oh, and special thanks to gillbz for making the view distance mod that made most of these pics possible.
We have arrived in the Ohcton system in the Rofl nebula to investigate an anomaly in our inertial dampening systems. Upon arrival the effect has only worsened, leaving our upper decks temporarily inaccessible.
I have taken advantage of the situation to get some much needed R&R.
*FOOOMPH*
Report.
I believe what we experienced was a Subspace Foomph, sir. The high concentration of Netheron particles of the planet's atmosphere have interfered with our Ionic Dogbert Calcinators creating a depression below us approximately one square kilometer in area.
Any damage to the ship?
Negative, sir. Also, the interference appears to have re-aligned our Inertial Precursor Arrays allowing us once again to proceed above deck 10.
Excellent. Whoopie, get me my Space Late*.
*It's been 20 years since I've seen the show. Characterization may not be accurate.
Fun Facts:
-It takes 8.5 minutes to run around the circumference (about 2km).
-Currently consists of approximately one million blocks.
-I've been making a ton of Cartograph snapshots to try and make a timelapse of once I'm finished with the saucer.
-I'm not really a fan of Star Trek. TNG was decent, but I prefer B5 and Farscape. Sci-Fi usually sucks outside of book form.
Also, I could really use a view distance mod and brightening/ambient light mod so I can actually see the thing. I'll do it myself if I have to but I've never touched Java before and I'm kind of busy so any help would be appreciated.
... He's not linking a minecraft level file (As no such file exists...), but a .zip. A .zip file can have lots of viruses, hidden in many different files.
Neither unzipping a file nor opening a minecraft level using any program currently designed to do that can possibly do anything more malicious than not work.
Two pages of near substanceless paranoia groupthink is ridiculous and there's no reason not to look for actual evidence to support your theory before hijacking a thread to shout fire for the 20th time.
Minecraft levels can't have viruses idiots. Why would you even be executing something you thought was a minecraft map?
So let's switch gears to congratulating the author for one of the most creative builds ever. This is definitely the best original epic creation I've seen.
Once I finish 10 I'll lower everything and try to transition the natural terrain and create a giant waterfall and natural lookout and such forward. I didn't do it yet to avoid the lighting bug where it lags when terrain is too low. That should happen in a week or so and I'll post a new diary and pics.
There will be three roughly 100m sections built one behind the other.
Quick question on the interior hallway. What blocks are you using there? It looks like you have a half step on the bottom with a block immediately on top. How did you manage that? Or am I missing something obvious?
I'm not positive what you're talking about but you can double-stack the half-blocks to make a regular one. I'm probably going with them in hallways because they give me a little extra headroom and I get to have those half-lights on the side which are re-textured lightstone (very handy) half-covered by the floor. It's a little wonky though as you have to step up going into rooms, the lighting is a bit bugged as you can see with the dark center tiles, and I can't have pressure plates because it's too ugly to go up another half-block for them (you can see me testing this on the right).
Thanks for the positive feedback guys. I have a day off today but I think I'll mostly take a break this one.
I've been modeling in Minecraft for a while now, in fact I haven't played normally for a long time. I haven't even seen the nether yet. My creations [url=http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=102719%20]typically[/url] top out at a few hundred meters and I've been itching to make something truly epic.
Most of you have probably seen the youtube video of the Minecraft Enterprise. I really didn't want to steal the idea or look like I was riding in the coattails of his popularity but I just couldn't think of a potential project as cool as that, and I knew I could do better artistically than what he was planning as well.
From my understanding his main project was actually a sketchup model, and when that was destroyed he took some blueprints and imported them into classic. If he ever built anything beyond that he's been extremely quiet about it.
Planning
First there's the matter of scaling. The official six-hundred something meter length of the Enterprise D (The Next Generation one) is frankly just wrong. The insides would be much too cramped for a luxury ship and with the extra-thick walls of Minecraft (plus everything just looks a bit smaller there for whatever reason) I need to scale up even more. The scale of the ship is actually extremely important -- at least to a perfectionist like me. Particularly the vertical height is very noticeable from the inside. The deck height also needs to be distributed just right, especially in the steeply sloping saucer section where a meter up or down essentially makes the outer rooms 5-10m wider or shorter (typically windowed crew quarters which can't easily be fudged) or messes with your outer curve. At 5m per deck plus various extras gives me a saucer height of 100m and an estimated final scale of 1066 x 784 x 236.
I picked the original Whitefire blueprints available [url=http://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/ed-whitefire-enterprise-ncc-1701d.php]here[/url], which was kind of a no-brainer for my purposes as it's full of labels like "Casino," "Botanical Garden (3 LVL)" and "Weapons Range (3 LVL)" as opposed to the more "realistic" ones full of office space.
At first I was expecting to find a 3d external model online to voxelize like I usually do but the pickings were surprisingly slim for such a nerd icon and with the precision I needed to get everything to match up I decided to model it by hand using the 2d blueprints and Paint.NET alone. There's not much consensus on the outer texturing either so I'm doing that by eyeballing various models and improvisation. I'm also using inventory hacks (obviously) and MCEdit for repetitive things like mirroring.
Minecraft: complicated stuff.
Early corridor test.
So in the two weeks or so since Beta came out this is what I've got:
For the last week or so I've been working on the warp engines which are about 400m long and quite challenging to model by hand, but at least that's one of the hardest parts out of the way. I'm not fully satisfied with the texturing so I might mess with that later.
Ice is a bit easier to work with than lava.
Now of course 236m is too high for survival so I plan to build it in three pieces: the separated saucer section, and an upper and lower engineering section that can be pasted together if a workaround is found. I've never worked with Java before but I imagine at least a hacked, buggy mod of maybe running the engine through two maps at once and patching together a few things like lighting should do the trick for my purposes. It would also be handy to have a view distance mod and some sort of ambient light mod so the undersides aren't pitch black. I'm also putting together a rough custom texture pack although I want it to still look good with the default ones.
For the insides I'll probably let the community help on that. Once the saucer section and the placement of internal walls is finished I'll release that and accept MCEdit schematics of proposed rooms to compile together.
0
0
With the new 256 height limit and terrain generation set to flat the limit isn't a problem anymore. 236 blocks total I believe.
5
Update 2:
Completed lower decks 42 thru 30.
Update 1:
So after a long hiatus I've decided to finally complete my Enterprise D mega-project last seen here.
Getting the planning and the curves of the lower section just right has been very time consuming, but I have most of the difficult parts constructed or planned out by now.
Older posts (saucer section):
Post 1
Post 2
Post 3
1
The design was done by hand using a simple drawing program for drawing ellipses and planning things out, which took a lot of extra time. A lot of tweaking needed to be done to interpret the original plans and to make things like lifepods look good pixelated.
And to the token "but what about Star Wars?" guy, lots of people are doing Star Wars. Bear in mind most people here weren't even born the last time they put out anything good. Also the larger ships just aren't as interesting as a lot of others. I'd recommend B5 or other more obscure sci-fi for a large build instead.
4
Part 2
More images can be found here.
-Current dimensions are 1066 x 784 x 100.
-Consists of about 3 million blocks.
-1.5 million square meters of floor space.
-60 km of hallways.
I'll start working on a timelapse video now using the few hundred cartograph snapshots I took. This topic will be updated with a link if that works out.
Oh, and special thanks to gillbz for making the view distance mod that made most of these pics possible.
Only 35 more decks to go!
0
The red lines are re-textured rails BTW.
0
Some more recent pics:
0
It would be nice to have an offset x/y/z feature for the layering.
0
I've seen lots of of Star Wars stuff. This is my favorite.
1
Captain's log, stardate 4224.
We have arrived in the Ohcton system in the Rofl nebula to investigate an anomaly in our inertial dampening systems. Upon arrival the effect has only worsened, leaving our upper decks temporarily inaccessible.
I have taken advantage of the situation to get some much needed R&R.
*FOOOMPH*
Report.
I believe what we experienced was a Subspace Foomph, sir. The high concentration of Netheron particles of the planet's atmosphere have interfered with our Ionic Dogbert Calcinators creating a depression below us approximately one square kilometer in area.
Any damage to the ship?
Negative, sir. Also, the interference appears to have re-aligned our Inertial Precursor Arrays allowing us once again to proceed above deck 10.
Excellent. Whoopie, get me my Space Late*.
*It's been 20 years since I've seen the show. Characterization may not be accurate.
Fun Facts:
-It takes 8.5 minutes to run around the circumference (about 2km).
-Currently consists of approximately one million blocks.
-I've been making a ton of Cartograph snapshots to try and make a timelapse of once I'm finished with the saucer.
-I'm not really a fan of Star Trek. TNG was decent, but I prefer B5 and Farscape. Sci-Fi usually sucks outside of book form.
Also, I could really use a view distance mod and brightening/ambient light mod so I can actually see the thing. I'll do it myself if I have to but I've never touched Java before and I'm kind of busy so any help would be appreciated.
0
Neither unzipping a file nor opening a minecraft level using any program currently designed to do that can possibly do anything more malicious than not work.
Two pages of near substanceless paranoia groupthink is ridiculous and there's no reason not to look for actual evidence to support your theory before hijacking a thread to shout fire for the 20th time.
0
So let's switch gears to congratulating the author for one of the most creative builds ever. This is definitely the best original epic creation I've seen.
0
Once I finish 10 I'll lower everything and try to transition the natural terrain and create a giant waterfall and natural lookout and such forward. I didn't do it yet to avoid the lighting bug where it lags when terrain is too low. That should happen in a week or so and I'll post a new diary and pics.
There will be three roughly 100m sections built one behind the other.
0
I'm not positive what you're talking about but you can double-stack the half-blocks to make a regular one. I'm probably going with them in hallways because they give me a little extra headroom and I get to have those half-lights on the side which are re-textured lightstone (very handy) half-covered by the floor. It's a little wonky though as you have to step up going into rooms, the lighting is a bit bugged as you can see with the dark center tiles, and I can't have pressure plates because it's too ugly to go up another half-block for them (you can see me testing this on the right).
Thanks for the positive feedback guys. I have a day off today but I think I'll mostly take a break this one.
1
I've been modeling in Minecraft for a while now, in fact I haven't played normally for a long time. I haven't even seen the nether yet. My creations [url=http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=102719%20]typically[/url] top out at a few hundred meters and I've been itching to make something truly epic.
Most of you have probably seen the youtube video of the Minecraft Enterprise. I really didn't want to steal the idea or look like I was riding in the coattails of his popularity but I just couldn't think of a potential project as cool as that, and I knew I could do better artistically than what he was planning as well.
From my understanding his main project was actually a sketchup model, and when that was destroyed he took some blueprints and imported them into classic. If he ever built anything beyond that he's been extremely quiet about it.
Planning
First there's the matter of scaling. The official six-hundred something meter length of the Enterprise D (The Next Generation one) is frankly just wrong. The insides would be much too cramped for a luxury ship and with the extra-thick walls of Minecraft (plus everything just looks a bit smaller there for whatever reason) I need to scale up even more. The scale of the ship is actually extremely important -- at least to a perfectionist like me. Particularly the vertical height is very noticeable from the inside. The deck height also needs to be distributed just right, especially in the steeply sloping saucer section where a meter up or down essentially makes the outer rooms 5-10m wider or shorter (typically windowed crew quarters which can't easily be fudged) or messes with your outer curve. At 5m per deck plus various extras gives me a saucer height of 100m and an estimated final scale of 1066 x 784 x 236.
I picked the original Whitefire blueprints available [url=http://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/ed-whitefire-enterprise-ncc-1701d.php]here[/url], which was kind of a no-brainer for my purposes as it's full of labels like "Casino," "Botanical Garden (3 LVL)" and "Weapons Range (3 LVL)" as opposed to the more "realistic" ones full of office space.
At first I was expecting to find a 3d external model online to voxelize like I usually do but the pickings were surprisingly slim for such a nerd icon and with the precision I needed to get everything to match up I decided to model it by hand using the 2d blueprints and Paint.NET alone. There's not much consensus on the outer texturing either so I'm doing that by eyeballing various models and improvisation. I'm also using inventory hacks (obviously) and MCEdit for repetitive things like mirroring.
So in the two weeks or so since Beta came out this is what I've got:
For the last week or so I've been working on the warp engines which are about 400m long and quite challenging to model by hand, but at least that's one of the hardest parts out of the way. I'm not fully satisfied with the texturing so I might mess with that later.
Now of course 236m is too high for survival so I plan to build it in three pieces: the separated saucer section, and an upper and lower engineering section that can be pasted together if a workaround is found. I've never worked with Java before but I imagine at least a hacked, buggy mod of maybe running the engine through two maps at once and patching together a few things like lighting should do the trick for my purposes. It would also be handy to have a view distance mod and some sort of ambient light mod so the undersides aren't pitch black. I'm also putting together a rough custom texture pack although I want it to still look good with the default ones.
For the insides I'll probably let the community help on that. Once the saucer section and the placement of internal walls is finished I'll release that and accept MCEdit schematics of proposed rooms to compile together.