I have to ask, I'm still a beginner at 3D art...and I must ask, what shape do you use for the main drive section in the beginning?
For the Constitution class I used a circle. Others like the Essex I started with a plane or a cube.
First question I ask when starting a new model is 'what primitive is closest to the shape of the most prominent feature I'm trying to make?' so the secondary hull of the Constitution class starts as a circle and I extrude and scale it to shape. For the Essex I started with a cube and made loop cuts and moved vertices to fit the stretched hexagonal shape and extruded and scaled it to shape. I almost always start with a mirror modifier and subdivision surface modifier.
That helps a lot..thank you.
A quick question, \what shape would you use for the USS Voyager design,.?...since the main drive and saucer are one part?
A quick question, \what shape would you use for the USS Voyager design,.?...since the main drive and saucer are one part?
For Voyager I would start with getting some good reference images and ortho views,and set those up as background images. I would start with a circle and scale it so it matches the saucer width in top view and lines up with the bottom edge of the saucer rim in side view, then grab a vertex on the center line at the front and with proportional editing on, drag it forward until it matches the sweeping oval shape of the hull. Then I would delete half of the circle and mirror it. I would turn clipping off temporarily while I drag the rear verts to line up with where the saucer rim blends with the hull. Then I would select all the verts and with the loop tools addon space them all evenly. Then it's a matter of extruding and scaling to follow the shape of the hull. Make sure to try and keep your quads evenly distributed for subdivision, otherwise you'll get stretching and bunching it won't look right.
A quick question, \what shape would you use for the USS Voyager design,.?...since the main drive and saucer are one part?
For Voyager I would start with getting some good reference images and ortho views,and set those up as background images. I would start with a circle and scale it so it matches the saucer width in top view and lines up with the bottom edge of the saucer rim in side view, then grab a vertex on the center line at the front and with proportional editing on, drag it forward until it matches the sweeping oval shape of the hull. Then I would delete half of the circle and mirror it. I would turn clipping off temporarily while I drag the rear verts to line up with where the saucer rim blends with the hull. Then I would select all the verts and with the loop tools addon space them all evenly. Then it's a matter of extruding and scaling to follow the shape of the hull. Make sure to try and keep your quads evenly distributed for subdivision, otherwise you'll get stretching and bunching it won't look right.
A quick question, \what shape would you use for the USS Voyager design,.?...since the main drive and saucer are one part?
For Voyager I would start with getting some good reference images and ortho views,and set those up as background images. I would start with a circle and scale it so it matches the saucer width in top view and lines up with the bottom edge of the saucer rim in side view, then grab a vertex on the center line at the front and with proportional editing on, drag it forward until it matches the sweeping oval shape of the hull. Then I would delete half of the circle and mirror it. I would turn clipping off temporarily while I drag the rear verts to line up with where the saucer rim blends with the hull. Then I would select all the verts and with the loop tools addon space them all evenly. Then it's a matter of extruding and scaling to follow the shape of the hull. Make sure to try and keep your quads evenly distributed for subdivision, otherwise you'll get stretching and bunching it won't look right.
This could probably also be used for the Sovereign and Nova class, to a certain extent. Wish I knew that before I started on the latter.
It's taken me three attempts to get the basic shape to look right around the hull separation point, and I've been playing whack-a-vertex with stretching and unsmooth surfaces on the belly of the engineering hull all evening! I think I managed to finally get to look decent only after deleting every other subdivision line!
I think that my problem was adding too many subdivisions, or extruding outwards a little bit at a time from the point where the hull separates in both directions, which I found more manageable than trying to start off with the very basic shape of the hull. But again, maybe that caused warping to the mesh.
My brains have been learning for years and years. Tutorials on youtube have been a huge help for me.
can you post some of the tutorials that helped you with panel lining and windows?
If it doesn't take too much of your time, naturally (I know personally how long modeling takes)!
I'll see if I can do a little writeup later tonight specifically on panels and windows.
scifieric's tutorial series is a good start. He's on an older version of blender but all the tools and techniques are still applicable in the latest version, just maybe in a different place.
Ryan King Art is a great source for materials and basics.
I'm on my phone so I can't grab links for everything.
The Blender Bros: Josh Gambrell and Ponte Ryuuri are a great source for hard surface techniques, but they use some paid addons in their workflow, (HardOps and BoxCutter. $38 bundle, and meshmachine $40 and machin3tools $1 on blender market) not cheap but I use them and I think the addons are worth it! I'd recommend waiting to get them until you're comfortable with doing things in blender without them because getting them all at once can be a bit of a new tool overload.
Other essential addons for me are looptools and booltool which are included with blender but you'll have to go into preferences as activate them.
Also uvsquares ($15.95 on blender market) but I'll write more about that one when it's relevant.
Starting with a plane, I deleted only the face, and with ctrl+R to add, and G to move the verts, I made a rough saucer profile with an edge at the 3D Cursor.
If the cursor isn't where you need it, select the vertex or edge and shift+s and cursor to selected.
Smooth out the profile a little by beveling a few verts ctrl+b and then v to affect vertices.
It doesn't need to be too high detail yet. Next up, spin tool.
I find 32 steps is a good start. Subdivision will smooth things out later. Since I'm going to mirror it around and save myself some time, I backed it off to 90° and 8 steps.
Mirror modifier along X and Y with clipping on.
Add a subdivision surface modifier, and if it smooths unexpectedly like happened here, check it with face orientation option in the viewport overlay options
A to select all and Alt+N and recalculate outside.
If you have HardOps, you can use the hotkey in object mode and choose the sharpen option to shade smooth, and automatically mark sharp edges with a crease and bevel weight.
If not, you can do the same by choosing Shade Auto Smooth in the Object menu.
And in Edit Mode, select the edges you want to be sharp and set the edge crease and bevel weight to 1
Add a bevel modifier and set the limit method to weight, and choose a segment count and bevel amount
Select the edges you want to be panel lines, and to make things easier for later, assign them to a vertex group
Make sure to switch to face select mode and deselect any unwanted faces just in case. It shouldn't affect the bevel but I do it anyway.
Bevel the edges with a very small width and one segment.
Crease and bevel weight the edges (or HOps hotkey>mark) and ctrl+f extrude along normals with the same offset that you used for the bevel, but negative.
If you have the subdiv modifier active you can see where the uncreased edges allow everything to get all melty-looking, but you can fix it by selecting one of the edges and in the menu Select>Select Similar>Length you can select them all and crease them.
The bevel modifier should clamp down on the small edges, but if not, check Clamp Overlap in the Bevel modifier under Geometry.
If you had larger bevels that you want to preserve you can select a bevel weighted edge and select similar, then deselect the edges you want the larger bevel on, and reduce the bevel weight on the panel edges until the clamping doesn't affect the larger bevel edges.
You'll probably have areas where panel lines intersect and one side curves too far in either direction or panel lines that aren't smooth.
Fix these by selecting the offending edges and adjusting the crease and bevel weight.
Things might look a little pillowy still, but select all your faces, alt+n and reset vectors might work. If it doesn't, check for doubles with M and merge by distance.
No time left tonight to show how I do windows. My dog is going nuts! hahahah
It's always interesting seeing the methods that people use to do things that are different than yours. After all, it never hurts to learn alternative ways of doing things.
First part is similar to how I do my saucers (I use a combination of the screw modifier, bevel modifier, and sub-d to get the initial shape), but that method of modelling the panels is interesting. I'll have to give it a go sometime.
First part is similar to how I do my saucers (I use a combination of the screw modifier, bevel modifier, and sub-d to get the initial shape), but that method of modelling the panels is interesting. I'll have to give it a go sometime.
I'm sure there are many better ways to do it. This method depends on already having edges where the panel will go, and can get a bit tricky with the subd and creases to keep it from straightening out. I could have avoided the creases interfering with the subdivision smoothing by starting with more steps in the spin.
422m according to Admiral Buck himself. His model was about 48 inches in 1/350 scale, so it maths out to about 426m or so, which is what I'm working at.
scifieric's tutorial series is a good start. He's on an older version of blender but all the tools and techniques are still applicable in the latest version, just maybe in a different place.
Thank you, Sir! I greatly appreciate your kind words and you recommending my old series to people! Very nice!
Plus, how you outlined what to do? Excellent! I'd definitely follow any tutorial you put out!
Indeed she does!
I'm calling this one USS Victoria NCC-5272. Endurance was Shackleton's ship for his antarctic voyage, so I wanted another explorer's ship name. Victoria was Magellan's vessel.
Here's a writeup on how I do registries with geometry.
I've got two bezier circles and my ship name and registry number as text objects
Add a curve modifier to the text and select the bezier circles as the curve object. The position will be a bit wonky at first, so move, scale, and rotate until it's in the right spot.
Now, the text wrapped around the curve doesn't have enough geometry to match the curve correctly. Here you see errors on the 5. I have face orientation active in the viewport overlays, and the default blue turned off in preferences.
If I enable 'Apply on Splines' it gets rid of those errors, but there's still not enough geometry to curve smoothly. Note the flat bottom of the 5.
Convert the text object to mesh. The curve modifier will be discarded, but we'll add it back later.
Edit mode, select all, and extrude the text. Check out those horrible long triangles!
Add a Remesh modifier, and set it to Sharp, octree depth I have at 9, make sure to uncheck 'remove disconnected'
Apply the Remesh, and delete everything but the top faces. Add the curve modifier again, as well as shrinkwrap.
Set shrinkwrap to project, check negative, and choose your hull mesh. and set your offset to just enough to keep from clipping. I use .001
in the object properties on your text mesh, uncheck diffuse, glossy, and shadow under ray visibility. This'll make the text look like it's on the surface instead of floating just above it.
Posts
That helps a lot..thank you.
A quick question, \what shape would you use for the USS Voyager design,.?...since the main drive and saucer are one part?
For Voyager I would start with getting some good reference images and ortho views,and set those up as background images. I would start with a circle and scale it so it matches the saucer width in top view and lines up with the bottom edge of the saucer rim in side view, then grab a vertex on the center line at the front and with proportional editing on, drag it forward until it matches the sweeping oval shape of the hull. Then I would delete half of the circle and mirror it. I would turn clipping off temporarily while I drag the rear verts to line up with where the saucer rim blends with the hull. Then I would select all the verts and with the loop tools addon space them all evenly. Then it's a matter of extruding and scaling to follow the shape of the hull. Make sure to try and keep your quads evenly distributed for subdivision, otherwise you'll get stretching and bunching it won't look right.
Wow...you are truly more advance than me...I only understood half of that...lol.
But I'll try what you said my best....Thank you.
I wish I had your brains, bro.
This could probably also be used for the Sovereign and Nova class, to a certain extent. Wish I knew that before I started on the latter.
It's taken me three attempts to get the basic shape to look right around the hull separation point, and I've been playing whack-a-vertex with stretching and unsmooth surfaces on the belly of the engineering hull all evening! I think I managed to finally get to look decent only after deleting every other subdivision line!
I think that my problem was adding too many subdivisions, or extruding outwards a little bit at a time from the point where the hull separates in both directions, which I found more manageable than trying to start off with the very basic shape of the hull. But again, maybe that caused warping to the mesh.
can you post some of the tutorials that helped you with panel lining and windows?
If it doesn't take too much of your time, naturally (I know personally how long modeling takes)!
I'll see if I can do a little writeup later tonight specifically on panels and windows.
scifieric's tutorial series is a good start. He's on an older version of blender but all the tools and techniques are still applicable in the latest version, just maybe in a different place.
Ryan King Art is a great source for materials and basics.
I'm on my phone so I can't grab links for everything.
The Blender Bros: Josh Gambrell and Ponte Ryuuri are a great source for hard surface techniques, but they use some paid addons in their workflow, (HardOps and BoxCutter. $38 bundle, and meshmachine $40 and machin3tools $1 on blender market) not cheap but I use them and I think the addons are worth it! I'd recommend waiting to get them until you're comfortable with doing things in blender without them because getting them all at once can be a bit of a new tool overload.
Other essential addons for me are looptools and booltool which are included with blender but you'll have to go into preferences as activate them.
Also uvsquares ($15.95 on blender market) but I'll write more about that one when it's relevant.
That's a gorgeous angle for this design. You're doing a great job on the modeling, as usual.
Starting with a plane, I deleted only the face, and with ctrl+R to add, and G to move the verts, I made a rough saucer profile with an edge at the 3D Cursor.
If the cursor isn't where you need it, select the vertex or edge and shift+s and cursor to selected.
Smooth out the profile a little by beveling a few verts ctrl+b and then v to affect vertices.
It doesn't need to be too high detail yet. Next up, spin tool.
I find 32 steps is a good start. Subdivision will smooth things out later. Since I'm going to mirror it around and save myself some time, I backed it off to 90° and 8 steps.
Mirror modifier along X and Y with clipping on.
Add a subdivision surface modifier, and if it smooths unexpectedly like happened here, check it with face orientation option in the viewport overlay options
A to select all and Alt+N and recalculate outside.
If you have HardOps, you can use the hotkey in object mode and choose the sharpen option to shade smooth, and automatically mark sharp edges with a crease and bevel weight.
If not, you can do the same by choosing Shade Auto Smooth in the Object menu.
And in Edit Mode, select the edges you want to be sharp and set the edge crease and bevel weight to 1
Add a bevel modifier and set the limit method to weight, and choose a segment count and bevel amount
Select the edges you want to be panel lines, and to make things easier for later, assign them to a vertex group
Make sure to switch to face select mode and deselect any unwanted faces just in case. It shouldn't affect the bevel but I do it anyway.
Bevel the edges with a very small width and one segment.
Crease and bevel weight the edges (or HOps hotkey>mark) and ctrl+f extrude along normals with the same offset that you used for the bevel, but negative.
If you have the subdiv modifier active you can see where the uncreased edges allow everything to get all melty-looking, but you can fix it by selecting one of the edges and in the menu Select>Select Similar>Length you can select them all and crease them.
The bevel modifier should clamp down on the small edges, but if not, check Clamp Overlap in the Bevel modifier under Geometry.
If you had larger bevels that you want to preserve you can select a bevel weighted edge and select similar, then deselect the edges you want the larger bevel on, and reduce the bevel weight on the panel edges until the clamping doesn't affect the larger bevel edges.
You'll probably have areas where panel lines intersect and one side curves too far in either direction or panel lines that aren't smooth.
Fix these by selecting the offending edges and adjusting the crease and bevel weight.
Things might look a little pillowy still, but select all your faces, alt+n and reset vectors might work. If it doesn't, check for doubles with M and merge by distance.
No time left tonight to show how I do windows. My dog is going nuts! hahahah
Thanks!
I'm sure there are many better ways to do it. This method depends on already having edges where the panel will go, and can get a bit tricky with the subd and creases to keep it from straightening out. I could have avoided the creases interfering with the subdivision smoothing by starting with more steps in the spin.
Plus, how you outlined what to do? Excellent! I'd definitely follow any tutorial you put out!
She Has those kind of lines.
I'm calling this one USS Victoria NCC-5272. Endurance was Shackleton's ship for his antarctic voyage, so I wanted another explorer's ship name. Victoria was Magellan's vessel.
I've got two bezier circles and my ship name and registry number as text objects
Add a curve modifier to the text and select the bezier circles as the curve object. The position will be a bit wonky at first, so move, scale, and rotate until it's in the right spot.
Now, the text wrapped around the curve doesn't have enough geometry to match the curve correctly. Here you see errors on the 5. I have face orientation active in the viewport overlays, and the default blue turned off in preferences.
If I enable 'Apply on Splines' it gets rid of those errors, but there's still not enough geometry to curve smoothly. Note the flat bottom of the 5.
Convert the text object to mesh. The curve modifier will be discarded, but we'll add it back later.
Edit mode, select all, and extrude the text. Check out those horrible long triangles!
Add a Remesh modifier, and set it to Sharp, octree depth I have at 9, make sure to uncheck 'remove disconnected'
Apply the Remesh, and delete everything but the top faces. Add the curve modifier again, as well as shrinkwrap.
Set shrinkwrap to project, check negative, and choose your hull mesh. and set your offset to just enough to keep from clipping. I use .001
in the object properties on your text mesh, uncheck diffuse, glossy, and shadow under ray visibility. This'll make the text look like it's on the surface instead of floating just above it.