The Conny
USS Constellation, CVG 64
As a rabid sci fi fan I was designing my own spaceships as far back as high school. This design,
a spaceborne carrier, began in the 1970s, and the design survives pretty much intact in my recent
rendering in Caligari Truespace. The tubes around the hull are launch catapult tubes for the ships'
fighters, while larger craft exit through the yellow rolling doors at the midships hangar bay.
From astern we see the aft launch tubes surrounding the fusion reactor core, and the ship's massive
hyperlight engines (I've yet to come up with a definitive drive technobabble). At this stage of
design, the sensor/weapons masts (the barbs around the tubes in the first image) were not applied).
This is an earlier rendering I did before I created the final image maps. The escort vessels are the first
pass I made at the "space PT boats" suggested by my friend Frank for one of our proposed video
projects. Yes, the background is stolen - er, borrowed - from a Babylon Five episode.
Here she is rolling into a space station I designed (which see seperately). The station became so
complex that my PC would lock up when I tried to move the 3D object. Forget about animating it!
Animations
Something I'd been dying to do since high school, an effects sequence (however poor) of the
Conny launching the number one ready fighter. The fighter is something I have thoroughly
documented on paper (since 1974!), but I have yet to commit it to a detailed computer model.
This anim was done entirely in Caligari TrueSpace and assembled in Adobe premiere.
I did the second animation recently, mostly as a test to see what I could do using Bryce 5.
Turns out you can do quite a bit! This features the "space PT Boat" designed for the film
my friend Frank and I will never get around to doing. The working title of the video series
was to be "Magna 109." Here I whipped together a spurious episode opening title sequence as a
treat for him. Models created in Caligari (the Magna is missing its image maps), animated in Bryce 5,
and edited in Premiere.
Back to In Payne
