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3DGalaxy Class in Blender

Polaris 004Polaris 004199 Posts: 752Member
edited December 2014 in Work in Progress #1
Well, I don't really have any business trying to model this ship yet... she's far too well known and far too difficult to model, with her organic lines and complex geometry. I'm hopelessly out of my depth. But of course I love this class and sooner or later I have to have my own mesh of the Galaxy class.

I'm actually pretty pleased with myself that I got even this far. I have been trying on and off to figure out a basic approach to this lady for years. I have tried modeling the main hull literally dozens of ways. I finally found an approach that works pretty well. She's probably about 80% accurate, which is about all I can expect from my skill level. I will probably be adding to this thread for years to come.
107362.jpg
Post edited by Polaris 004 on
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  • Vortex5972Vortex5972321 Posts: 1,202Member
    She looks amazing. Growing up with TNG, I have a soft spot for this ship.

    You've done more than I can currently do. I have a hard time figuring out how to approach building things. This years task is to become proficient at Blender.

    Looking forward to seeing how you progress. Best of luck with it.
  • evil_genius_180evil_genius_1804256 Posts: 11,034Member
    This is the Mt. Everest of Trek ships. I'd say there are none more difficult than this. You're definitely doing a great job on her so far. :)
  • StarshipStarship464 São Paulo - BrasilPosts: 1,976Member
    Indeed, a good start!
  • madman1701amadman1701a339 Posts: 366Member
    Looks great...I haven't gotten the guts up to build this either. :)

    -Ricky
  • Polaris 004Polaris 004199 Posts: 752Member
    I am exhausted. I have completely rebuilt the neck portion of this mesh about 5 times, and re-cut the saucer cut-outs for the connection point about 4 different ways. All that effort made the mesh about 6% better, so it was worth it, but man does my head hurt. I think this base mesh is about as good as I can get it, with my skill level.

    GCT1_zpsd93fc694.jpg

    GCT2_zps730fe62d.jpg

    GCT3_zpsc696b426.jpg

    GCT4_zpsc4d1bbcc.jpg

    I swear, I must have come within a hair of giving up on this project at least a dozen times already. Something that really helped was when I downloaded the most recent version of Blender, it had some new knife tools that really helped me out.


    Anyway, I am going to want to move on to detailing soon, so feedback please.
  • evil_genius_180evil_genius_1804256 Posts: 11,034Member
    I'd say it's more than 6% better. The shape looks a lot more accurate now.
  • xumucanexumucane0 Posts: 0Member
    Wow. You are really effing brave trying to do a Galaxy. I drove myself half crazy just trying to make decent 2D orthos in Illustrator. Looking good. Making good progress. Seems like maybe there's an edge in the neck that's a wee sharp and is making it looks like there's a crease. Or it could be the lighting. I can't tell. Looking great though. Watching this one very keenly.
  • McCMcC373 Posts: 704Member
    Looks pretty good, though I'd be curious to see wires and especially ortho-wires.
  • Polaris 004Polaris 004199 Posts: 752Member
    McC wrote: »
    Looks pretty good, though I'd be curious to see wires and especially ortho-wires.

    Sure. Here's some screenshots to start with, let me know if there's anything else in particular you want to see.
    xumucane wrote: »
    Wow. You are really effing brave trying to do a Galaxy. I drove myself half crazy just trying to make decent 2D orthos in Illustrator. Looking good. Making good progress. Seems like maybe there's an edge in the neck that's a wee sharp and is making it looks like there's a crease. Or it could be the lighting. I can't tell. Looking great though. Watching this one very keenly.

    Yes, I have a troublesome triangle on the side of the neck. Everything I do to try to fix it makes it worse. This was the best compromise i was able to come up with. I will pick at it a bit more, but i don't know if i can make it go away.
    I'd say it's more than 6% better. The shape looks a lot more accurate now.

    Thanks. The whole trick with this mesh is the neck. Does anyone else remember Don Music from Sesame Street? That's been me for three weeks: "oh, I'll never get it, never, never.. *head bangs down on keyboard.*"

    Screenshot1_zps23e9123f.png

    Here's the neck already hardened and cut.





    Screenshot2_zps24a4cde4.png

    Same thing, different angle.





    Screenshot4_zps5bb64a55.png

    Here's the neck as a subsurface mesh, pre-cut. You can see that problem triangle on the side of the neck, right above the cursor circle. How I hate that bastard triangle...





    Screenshot5_zps375cc711.png

    Here's the main body mesh, it's still subsurface.





    Screenshot6_zps8d60360f.png

    The body from the top.





    Screenshot7_zpse2e9c88a.png

    Pylon supports. Eventually, I want these to be integrated seamlessly with the body. I may have to re-build them to achieve that.





    Screenshot8_zps15b2d65a.png

    Here's the Pylon support mesh. Even if I end up using this mesh, I can cut the front of that triangle tongue off once it's hardened to a mesh.





    Screenshot10_zps4b089921.png

    Looks fairly good from behind?





    Screenshot11_zps52f65a9d.png

    The separation plane came out pretty smooth on the top.
  • McCMcC373 Posts: 704Member
    Okay, excellent, a few points then.

    1) The neck, engineering hull, and pylons should all really be one unified piece. You can do it separate, but it'll never look quite as good as a when it comes from a single well-constructed subsurf cage.

    2) Avoid freezing your subsurfs until you're 100% absolutely dead-set-certain you can't possibly do anything more to refine the shape and you're ready to start cutting in detail that would be impossible to do in the subsurf itself.

    3) Look into "Crease" to help control your subsurf edges. I wrote a tutorial on subsurf hull modeling in Blender here. (Check out the video link at the bottom of that page, too, to Grant Warwick's Hard Surface Essentials. Lots of great demonstrations on how to tackle subsurf issues.)

    4) If you're planning to do a separable saucer, definitely put at least the major geometry into the subsurf for the "cobra head" on the engineering hull.

    5) If you don't have them, definitely get the addons mentioned here, as they make many modeling tasks significantly more straightforward. In particular, LoopTools > Curve, LoopTools > Space, and LoopTools > Relax are indispensable when it comes to smoothing out subsurf cages. I see a fair amount of distortion on your secondary hull mesh that a few minutes with these tools would fix right up.

    I know, that's a deluge of things. You've got a solid start, though, and I think you can definitely make this thing really shine. :)
  • Polaris 004Polaris 004199 Posts: 752Member
    McC wrote: »
    Okay, excellent, a few points then.

    1) The neck, engineering hull, and pylons should all really be one unified piece. You can do it separate, but it'll never look quite as good as a when it comes from a single well-constructed subsurf cage.

    2) Avoid freezing your subsurfs until you're 100% absolutely dead-set-certain you can't possibly do anything more to refine the shape and you're ready to start cutting in detail that would be impossible to do in the subsurf itself.

    3) Look into "Crease" to help control your subsurf edges. I wrote a tutorial on subsurf hull modeling in Blender here. (Check out the video link at the bottom of that page, too, to Grant Warwick's Hard Surface Essentials. Lots of great demonstrations on how to tackle subsurf issues.)

    4) If you're planning to do a separable saucer, definitely put at least the major geometry into the subsurf for the "cobra head" on the engineering hull.

    5) If you don't have them, definitely get the addons mentioned here, as they make many modeling tasks significantly more straightforward. In particular, LoopTools > Curve, LoopTools > Space, and LoopTools > Relax are indispensable when it comes to smoothing out subsurf cages. I see a fair amount of distortion on your secondary hull mesh that a few minutes with these tools would fix right up.

    I know, that's a deluge of things. You've got a solid start, though, and I think you can definitely make this thing really shine. :)




    1) I agree. I tried a number of times to integrate the neck and the Stardrive body, but never could get it to work. I will try again, though. I know the shape of the neck by heart now, so maybe this time I will be able to get it. As for the Pylons, I always intended to rebuild them from polygon extrusions at the back of the mesh.

    2) This is good advice in theory, but I find with this mesh I often have to skip ahead and see how things are going to work out later on. For example, I wanted to know if the new cutting tools I got would let me create the separation plane in the hardened mesh. Or could I model the seperate saucer and stardrive each as different sub surface models? It seems like the best way to go is to model the saucer and the neck together or at least joined at the back of the neck, and then to cut it apart as a hardened mesh? There was no way to test these ideas out without hardening the mesh. But in any case I always save every step of every mesh i do. Whenever I am about to do something irreparable, I save that session as a separate Blender file.

    3) Thanks, I will look into this. I could never really get crease to do anything, and still don't even really know what it's for. I'll definitely look into it.. Fantastic tutorial resource! Thank you so much for creating it, I will be studying it carefully.

    4) Yes, that would have to be done with a subsurface build. I think I know how to do it, I just didn't build it yet for this particular neck.

    5) Thanks! These are some great tools that I have yet to explore. Some of them are new to this version of Blender. I don't recall seein the option to "Dissolve" edges and faces before, for example. I should have upgraded sooner... Maybe they can chiropractor my neck...

    That was not a "deluge" at all. I think you have a really good sense of where I am at in my skills and gave me exactly the right amount and kind of feedback.. Thanks so much for taking the time. I hope I can use it to take this mesh a level or two higher.
  • IRMLIRML253 Posts: 1,993Member
    I built mine as two separate pieces
  • evil_genius_180evil_genius_1804256 Posts: 11,034Member
    Which model are you basing yours off of, Polaris? The 6 foot or the 4 foot? Or are you just basing it on whatever, as long as it looks good?
  • McCMcC373 Posts: 704Member
    1) I agree. I tried a number of times to integrate the neck and the Stardrive body, but never could get it to work. I will try again, though. I know the shape of the neck by heart now, so maybe this time I will be able to get it. As for the Pylons, I always intended to rebuild them from polygon extrusions at the back of the mesh.
    Oh, it's definitely a pain! :D I had a hell of a time with that area on my Ambassador, and it's not half so sleek and curvy as a Galax! But I think it pays off in the end.
    2) This is good advice in theory, but I find with this mesh I often have to skip ahead and see how things are going to work out later on. For example, I wanted to know if the new cutting tools I got would let me create the separation plane in the hardened mesh. Or could I model the seperate saucer and stardrive each as different sub surface models? It seems like the best way to go is to model the saucer and the neck together or at least joined at the back of the neck, and then to cut it apart as a hardened mesh? There was no way to test these ideas out without hardening the mesh.
    I would model them as two separate pieces, as IRML did, yeah.
    But in any case I always save every step of every mesh i do. Whenever I am about to do something irreparable, I save that session as a separate Blender file.
    Good! :D A tip for this: if you give your file a name with a numeric ending (e.g. galaxy.001.blend ), every time you bring up the Save As window, you can just hit the + key and it will increment the number for you! I changed my "Save As" shortcut to replace my "Save" shortcut specifically so I could take advantage of this and "force" auto-incrementing of my files. I know Blender has built-in backup revision, but it gives the files funny extensions (.blend1, .blend2, etc), so this method is much preferable.
    3) Thanks, I will look into this. I could never really get crease to do anything, and still don't even really know what it's for. I'll definitely look into it..
    Crease is weird, because you don't use it where you'd think you would. Never* use crease on an actual corner, or you'll just get a hard edge and defeat the entire point of using subsurf. Instead, use crease on an edge loop next to a corner to control the density of polygons along that corner. The big graphic at the end of the tutorial I linked shows this in a simple case and I'd be happy to consult on any problem areas you run into.
    Fantastic tutorial resource! Thank you so much for creating it, I will be studying it carefully.
    Thanks! :D I try to drive as many Blender folks toward it as I can in the hopes that it will save them from having to learn some of the more painful lessons I learned the hard way.
    5) Thanks! These are some great tools that I have yet to explore. Some of them are new to this version of Blender. I don't recall seein the option to "Dissolve" edges and faces before, for example. I should have upgraded sooner... Maybe they can chiropractor my neck...
    Dissolve is a must-have.

    I wish there were a better way to keep Blender up-to-date on a Windows machine than "check the site and download a new version if it's available." On Linux, Blender keeps itself up-to-date more-or-less automatically, thanks to the magic of Synaptic repositories.
    That was not a "deluge" at all. I think you have a really good sense of where I am at in my skills and gave me exactly the right amount and kind of feedback.. Thanks so much for taking the time. I hope I can use it to take this mesh a level or two higher.
    I'll be over here cheering! :D
  • Polaris 004Polaris 004199 Posts: 752Member
    Which model are you basing yours off of, Polaris? The 6 foot or the 4 foot? Or are you just basing it on whatever, as long as it looks good?

    I draw on numerous sources. I have orths of Tobias' mesh for my background guides. So that's providing my rough silhouettes. Then for any particular part I am unclear on, I Google around for resources. Also, I have very old Ertl model that I can actually handle take apart. I have found that useful when trying to come up with general modeling approaches. In general, I find I like the detail of the 4 foot model better than the 6 foot, so when I detail and texture my Galaxy family meshes, that raised detail is the overall "look" I aspire to.
  • Polaris 004Polaris 004199 Posts: 752Member
    I think I managed to find a way to integrate the neck into the main body of the stardrive. I'm posting some pics of the subsurface mesh, and some pics of how it would harden right now. Clearly the mesh needs a lot of clean-up, but I wanted to know if my general approach is workable.




    Screenshot16_zps896c1056.png

    Screenshot15_zps52c7faa7.png

    Screenshot14_zps4446e544.png

    Screenshot13_zpsca3442f4.png

    Screenshot12_zpsb410fb62.png

    GCT6_zps461527b2.jpg

    GCT7_zps5811cbf5.jpg
  • evil_genius_180evil_genius_1804256 Posts: 11,034Member
    Dude, that's looking fantastic. Good job integrating the neck into the body. This has to be the most difficult part in all of Star Trek to model, so my hat's off to you for doing it. :thumb:
  • McCMcC373 Posts: 704Member
    Not bad! I see a couple of topological issues that addressing now will make your life easier in the long run, though.

    galaxy_001.jpg
    galaxy_002.jpg

    This might also be of some use. It's a "trick" I use for figuring out complex joins in subsurf cages. The lines in the image are meant to more-or-less represent your Neck join from the angle of the first of the two preceding images. If it's not clear, let me know and I'll try to do an actual 3D mockup.

    crease_joins.jpg
  • nightfevernightfever361 Posts: 585Member
    This is how I did this section. Hope it helps :)

    galaxy_A.jpg
    galaxy_B.jpg
  • Polaris 004Polaris 004199 Posts: 752Member
    McC: Wow. I cannot thank you enough for taking the time to give the nuts-and-bolts advice I need on this mesh. That was very generous of you to take the time, and the mesh you provided as a quick example is just brilliant. I am going to study it very carefully, and perhaps even try to make my own version of it.

    Nightfever: Likewise your mesh screen capture gives me a much clearer idea of what a clean approach to the shape would look like. I am going to try to get my mesh as close to this level of clarity as I can. I appreciate you sharing your work in order to help me out.

    Thank you for the encouragement, everyone. I will be going back to it shortly.
  • Polaris 004Polaris 004199 Posts: 752Member
    Just a small update. as you can see, the general quality of mesh is much higher. I owe great thanks to McC and nightfever. I studied both their examples and tried to integrate as much of McC's advice as i could. I am tremendously pleased with the improvement. Although I never did figure out the crease feature or the loop space tool. I could not get either of them to do anything useful for me. I will have to study some tutorials and practice more until I get the idea better. But even without the help of those features this mexh has taken a huge leap forward. Yay!


    GCT9_zpsdeb57f5b.jpg

    GCT8_zps8f8603a0.jpg

    Screenshot19_zpsd9f28863.png

    Screenshot20_zpsc6812785.png

    Screenshot21_zps166d72ff.png

    Screenshot18_zpse9ff4cb2.png

    I still am going to tinker a bit more with this mesh. I want to extrude the impulse engine block at the back of the neck, re-build the top of the battle bridge/ connection plane area (that piece that's there was just a temporary placeholder) and just generally fiddle with some of the points a bit. But it's already much better than my wildest hopes when i started out. So, thanks again, everyone for the help so far.
  • xumucanexumucane0 Posts: 0Member
    I don't think I ever really appreciated just how complicated all the swoopy shapes in the Galaxy class engineering hull until now. Looking good!
  • evil_genius_180evil_genius_1804256 Posts: 11,034Member
    You're definitely getting there. Great work. :thumb:
  • McCMcC373 Posts: 704Member
    Hell yeah! That's awesome work, dude!
    Although I never did figure out the crease feature or the loop space tool. I could not get either of them to do anything useful for me.

    See if this helps explain what Crease does:

    subsurf_crease_simple.jpg

    LoopTools > Space takes your existing selection and evenly spaces all of the points in it. This is a really crappy example I knocked together, based on your screenshot:

    looptools_space_galaxy.jpg
  • SchimpfySchimpfy396 Posts: 1,632Member
    That mesh is shaping up nicely, Polaris. :thumb:

    McC, you sir, are awesome for pointing out everything like that. I'm thinking of switching to Blender since I won't have Max much longer and your explanations make the program much less intimidating to me to learn from scratch. Kudos, man. :)
  • McCMcC373 Posts: 704Member
    Juvat wrote: »
    McC, you sir, are awesome for pointing out everything like that. I'm thinking of switching to Blender since I won't have Max much longer and your explanations make the program much less intimidating to me to learn from scratch. Kudos, man. :)
    Hey, thanks! :D I'm just really glad that something like Blender exists -- a full-featured, incredibly powerful, completely competitive OPEN SOURCE 3D suite. My excitement tends to spill over into trying to foster and promote it by sharing whatever knowledge I can of how to achieve things with it that seem daunting or even impossible at first blush.

    It's by no means an easy program to pick up and I dare say that it might even be harder to pick up after you've already learned other 3D packages (this coming from someone who "learned on" trueSpace and LightWave, and then used Maya and Max professionally for several years). There's a lot to unlearn about the way those programs do tings, but once you've wrapped your head around Blender's methods, I've found it to be incredibly rewarding to work in!
  • Polaris 004Polaris 004199 Posts: 752Member
    Well, Crease and Loop Tools> Space, are definitely working better for me now. I just needed to muck about a bit more. Very useful stuff. My thanks again, and again and again McC! Also, that edge loop Bridge feature saved me a BUNCH of time when I was messing around with the saucer edge and stuff. Finally, The Line and Vertex dissolve features open up a WHOLE BUNCH of possibilities. NICE.



    Screenshot22_zps3d6d348b.png

    Screenshot23_zpsa36832dc.png

    I have worked some more on my subsurface mesh, continuing to delete extra verts and make the shape as smooth and regular as possible.





    Screenshot25_zps30a41df4.png

    Screenshot24_zpsad397f7f.png
    Here's an up-close view of the deflector area. It isn't 100% perfect, but I think it's about as close as I can get it.





    Here are some pics of the hardened mesh with some details added in. I took two or three tries at them, and I can always go back and try again, but I think this last attempt is pretty good:

    Screenshot22_zps52fe9fa1.jpg

    GCT14_zps08198af5.jpg

    GCT12_zps5c0f6d35.jpg



    I got rid of the old nacelles, which were hold-overs from my nebula class mesh, and built her her own. This lady is worth the extra effort.
    GCT13_zpsdfd080e4.jpg

    GCT16_zpsa113acdd.jpg

    GCT15_zpsaf74ab54.jpg

    Here are a couple Stardrive shots.


    On the whole I think I can proceed onward from this point. I think I have the rough mesh in place and can begin detailing it at a hopefully more leisurely pace. I have been working since mid-December to get to this point, but it has definitely been worth the effort.
  • SaquistSaquist1 Posts: 0Member
    All the familiar organic lines are there.
  • xumucanexumucane0 Posts: 0Member
    Looking great!
  • evil_genius_180evil_genius_1804256 Posts: 11,034Member
    All the extra work on this is paying off, it looks fantastic.
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