^And. . . that sounds like something someone else can do. It would be an interesting take, though.
The stardates? I just came up with something that seemed reasonable.
I used Blender's Workbench renderer with material colors and the orthographic setting on a camera to keep the scale for views. The rest done in Manga Studio 5. When I do my specifications, I strictly avoid nautical and biological terms, such as "draft" and "dorsal." It's not a boat, and it's not a fish.
And the Boolean unions have begun. On duplicates, of course.
Ah, the joy of sliding verts and dissolving edges. I fix one side and symmetrize, and in this case I had to separate the lower hull faces because of the asymmetric details. I discovered this process after I thought I could get away with selecting only the verts I wanted to effect, but that deleted faces. Next I'll union the nav deflector boom to the pylon sled, and then that whole piece to the saucer. Then reevaluate my deck layout, move windows if needed, then apply those booleans and get to fixing faces. I'm not going to union the nacelles to the pylon, because, one, one is a mirrored instance collection, and two, they should be able to be jettisoned. I'll make it look like the pylon is inserted into the nacelle.
I am being mindful of quads, but if I can't avoid ngons, I'm leaving them as long as it looks good.
Boolean and topology repair was going good, until...
Good thing I was working on duplicate meshes, because this area, as seen here on the originals, is a mess.
This is not an acceptable fix for this severe geometry mismatch on the Boolean union meshes. I tried many different way to blend it.
Looking for a solution on the original meshes, I learned proportional editing by moving the vertices in the beveled corner outboard did not help much, in part because...
... this oddly kicked up area is problem too. Don't know how or when that happened. Probably early in the build.
I'm going to have to rebuild the whole pylon sled to better match the bottom of the shuttlebay.
What you may find easier for that method is instead of booleaning out the cut, knife it out, then bridge the edge loop from the two parts together instead. you'll have much more control over the topo flow there. Once you've got the edge loop in place, you can add edge loops with ctrl+r and deform them with proportional editing or a curve modifier to get the flow consistent.
Alternatively, if you build that entire segment as one simple subd piece, and then union it with the saucer, you'll probably have much better results.
You can get some tech advice on the SFM discord if you want a bit more real time feedback for this.
Alternatively, if you build that entire segment as one simple subd piece, and then union it with the saucer, you'll probably have much better results.
I was going to suggest this - better to build it as a single piece. Whether it's subd or just beveled is a different matter, but starting with a single piece with good topology would be easier than trying to fix it after the fact.
You can get some tech advice on the SFM discord if you want a bit more real time feedback for this.
Fictional-universe-wise, I figured the manufacturing would be semi-modular, but I failed to make the pylon "sled" as wide as the shuttlebay—initially I hadn't intended to boolean union all these pieces together. I doubt the ship would be manufactured with that large bevel curving up under the shuttlebay overhang. It's a mess and the sidewall of the shuttlebay should extend into the sidewall of the sled. The saucer, BC/shuttlebay, and sled should be one congruous mesh. I'd like the forward edge of the sled to pull out from the saucer to get rid of the protruding bevels of the sled's forward face, so the sled mesh has to go. That superstructure would look better built out the geometry of the union of the saucer and shuttlebay. Easy build.
Separated some bits and parts. Extruded a box from the shuttlebay bottom and joined that with a separated section of the lower hull, and began to make faces.
Still some clean up to do, and putting things back together.
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The stardates? I just came up with something that seemed reasonable.
I used Blender's Workbench renderer with material colors and the orthographic setting on a camera to keep the scale for views. The rest done in Manga Studio 5. When I do my specifications, I strictly avoid nautical and biological terms, such as "draft" and "dorsal." It's not a boat, and it's not a fish.
And the Boolean unions have begun. On duplicates, of course.
Ah, the joy of sliding verts and dissolving edges. I fix one side and symmetrize, and in this case I had to separate the lower hull faces because of the asymmetric details. I discovered this process after I thought I could get away with selecting only the verts I wanted to effect, but that deleted faces. Next I'll union the nav deflector boom to the pylon sled, and then that whole piece to the saucer. Then reevaluate my deck layout, move windows if needed, then apply those booleans and get to fixing faces. I'm not going to union the nacelles to the pylon, because, one, one is a mirrored instance collection, and two, they should be able to be jettisoned. I'll make it look like the pylon is inserted into the nacelle.
I am being mindful of quads, but if I can't avoid ngons, I'm leaving them as long as it looks good.
Good thing I was working on duplicate meshes, because this area, as seen here on the originals, is a mess.
This is not an acceptable fix for this severe geometry mismatch on the Boolean union meshes. I tried many different way to blend it.
Looking for a solution on the original meshes, I learned proportional editing by moving the vertices in the beveled corner outboard did not help much, in part because...
... this oddly kicked up area is problem too. Don't know how or when that happened. Probably early in the build.
I'm going to have to rebuild the whole pylon sled to better match the bottom of the shuttlebay.
Alternatively, if you build that entire segment as one simple subd piece, and then union it with the saucer, you'll probably have much better results.
You can get some tech advice on the SFM discord if you want a bit more real time feedback for this.
Current Projects:
Ambassador Class
This times a thousand.
Fictional-universe-wise, I figured the manufacturing would be semi-modular, but I failed to make the pylon "sled" as wide as the shuttlebay—initially I hadn't intended to boolean union all these pieces together. I doubt the ship would be manufactured with that large bevel curving up under the shuttlebay overhang. It's a mess and the sidewall of the shuttlebay should extend into the sidewall of the sled. The saucer, BC/shuttlebay, and sled should be one congruous mesh. I'd like the forward edge of the sled to pull out from the saucer to get rid of the protruding bevels of the sled's forward face, so the sled mesh has to go. That superstructure would look better built out the geometry of the union of the saucer and shuttlebay. Easy build.
Still some clean up to do, and putting things back together.
Retopo looks decent, and those two pieces are joined back together.
Now to boolean everything together.