Creating Panels In Blender?

Posts

• mJAstro171 Posts: 0Member

  March 2007 #2

  

  What I like to do, albeit very tediously, is manually cut all the panels on the base of the ship (can always clone the base and do it on the clone) and then inset/extrude them. I work with 3ds max but Im assuming you can do something similar to that in blender.
• elitewolverine171 Posts: 0Member

  March 2007 #3

  

  Christomad wrote: »

  z0mg, I actually post!?!
  
  I'm fiddling about with a few BSG designs in Blender (really basic stuff, to be honest), and I was wondering what the best technique for creating the armour panels on the hull would be? I've experimented with boolean and the knife script, but I've not really had much luck so far.

  
  mmm paneling...well as a resident blender user, i would suggest this method...
  
  select the faces you want the panels on, do a little at a time! Dont try to panel you whole ship in one shot.
  
  1. select your faces,
  2. hit Ctlr-D, to duplicate the faces
  3. Hit Shift-H, to hide all the faces that are not selected
  4. Hit Ctrl-R to perform a loop cut, just like the knife tool but you can see the line before its cut and much easier than knife cause there is no submenus. When you choose ctrl-r, it works off the loop of the edge, so its not subject to selected faces just the edge you want. It will be more clear when you see for yourself, its pretty self explanatory.
  5.Keep hiting ctrl-r, and cutting tiny lines in your faces to simulate the lines that would appear in the hull. At this point it doesnt matter if the faces are curved or not.
  6. Once you have cut all your lines in the panel(s), then select your faces you want, making your panel layout.
  7. Hit, 'Spacebar', Choose 'select', choose 'inverse'. This will select everything you dont want, and unselect everything you want.
  8. Hit, 'x', and choose, 'Delete Faces'...its important, to choose faces, cause anything else will delete stuff you want to KEEP.
  9. Hit, 'a', to select everything
  10. Hit, 'e', to extrude and either manually type a number after hitting 'e' and remembering that number so all your panels are the same height or just do it by eye.
  11. once you have them extruded, hit, 'a', to select all, then hit 'p', choose 'selected'. And now your panels are another object and can be hidden by layers or stuff like that or deleted without the main mesh being hurt.
  
  Tips and tricks:
  1. Make sure when paneling all your normals are facing the same way so that when you hit extrude, especially on curved areas, it does not extrude some one way and some the other.
  2. The reason why you dont select your groove lines and just hit, x, is because actually selcting your panels gives you a nice look at what your panel patter will look like.
  3. Try finding a mix of cuts and lines so you can get a nice good even pattern of, 's' 't' and 'l' patterns out of the hull, etc etc...
  
  if need be i could post a very short video tutorial later if your still having problems
  
  enjoy hope that helps, this is the method i use to panel the ship in the thread, Leviathan Class Carrier, here in the wip section