Star Trek Excalibur Windows game

5 comments by AvalonStudios on Dec 18th, 2011

It's our final update of the year and we decided to save something special for the festive period.

As the first ship to carry the name Enterprise we just had to take a crack at NX01 and her sister ship NX02 Columbia. Both were were made from scratch for Excalibur, originally modelled by Luiz (LC) before being textured and tweaked by Mark.

Revisiting the NX Class has been a different experience, not least because Luiz and Mark worked so hard on a popular NX Class mod for Bridge Commander. Recreating the ship for Excalibur allowed the duo to right some of the wrongs of the old model. "Where the old textures were just cleverly photoshopped CGI renders on the old model, this time we decided to create the textures from scratch" says Mark who has had several years to dwell on the Bridge Commander mod. "The problem with just taking a pre-rendered image and plastering it onto the model like that is that you loose all of the beauty when the hull catches the light. All the shinyness and hull details are very flat.".

When it came to texturing the new ship, Mark explains that every care was taken to get the details just right. "There are some absolutely fantastic references out there for the original CGI model thanks to people like Doug Drexler who were involved in the original production, but for our ship we actually created textures that were even more detailed than what we could see. In many places I added fine hull lines where there were only a faint blur visible on the 5000 pixel-wide reference image".

So after all that hard work, is the end result worth it? "Every single part of the ship looks great, with individual hull panels shining in the light and tiny grooves on the hull adding a real sense of detail to the ship. The only thing we really have left to do is to get the phase canons animated and firing!".