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Blender: starship modelling techniques. Especially enterprise variants.
Judge Death.1
Posts: 0Member
I'd really like some general advice on modeling starships in blender, especially enterprise variants. Especially DoCs mad enterprise C version.
Some things I'd like to know about is cutting hull lines in a mesh. Also, do you model with the sugsurf on or apply the subsurf them detail?
Some things I'd like to know about is cutting hull lines in a mesh. Also, do you model with the sugsurf on or apply the subsurf them detail?
Post edited by Judge Death. on
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What makes it even more frustrating, and this is something worth noting Judge Death., is that this sort of sentiment is rampant and prevalent in a lot of the Blender art community (BlenderArtists in particular is awful about this).
On the very rare occasion that I post over there asking about something, I have to go far out of my way to ask a very specific question to avoid this response and even then I often have to ask people to focus on answering the question, not why I'm asking it.
Now then, on to business.
Who is DoC?
One thing I want to point out before we get started on this is that I don't make any claims that my way is the best way to do things. It's just the way I have thus far found to be the best and work for me. I may tout my credentials and experience from time to time, but there are people with far more experience and far better credentials that post on this forum that, I'm sure, are all too happy to roll their eyes at my doing so.
I also want to point out that I am really slow when it comes to this stuff. I spend a lot of time thinking and planning, trying things, screwing up, and doing things over. I've been working on the Ambassador model for over 250 hours now (over 220 of which is time spent in Blender), and that's not an estimate. That's actual, tracked time using ManicTime. I look at someone like tobiasrichter who can knock out something like Defiant or Deep Space Nine in a handful of days and just go
So, yeah, I'm pretty happy with how my Ambassador is turning out, but it hasn't magically materialized overnight. It's been a really long slog (started back in August 2012!) to get where it is now, and it's still got a ways to go before I'm even done modeling, let alone done with the whole thing.
Subdivision modeling is a curious beast. There are many applications wherein modeling exclusively in subdivision surfaces (subsurf) is desirable--car modeling, organic characters, and so on. There are also many applications where trying to do this is an exercise in frustration. Trek ships are a curious case because they're large, organic forms with small, architectural detail. (Side note: I once asked a question about optimizing frozen subsurf meshes on BlenderArtists, only to have someone tell me that no one does it that way; everyone models all the detail in subsurf and then renders it. I had to try really hard not to jump all over the guy. Yes, yes, I am a bit bitter.)
Long story short, while it is hypothetically possible to do a Trek-style mesh entirely in subsurf, I don't recommend it and I don't think you'll find that a common approach for the models made on this forum. Instead, use subsurf to get the major, continuous forms locked in place and then apply that subsurf once you're really happy with the overall form. (Side note: If you're not really happy with it, you're going to find yourself regretting it later, going back to earlier revisions, and having to re-do a lot of stuff. I think I did the shield grids on the saucer four times. By the time I got to the stardrive, I had my technique pretty well established, so I only had to do it once. However, I also realized post-freeze that I'd made a mistake in the shape of the neck inset, so I had to go back and redo that. Fortunately, I hadn't done much detailing yet!)
Here, for example, is my Ambassador's stardrive as a polygonal mesh without subsurf applied, with subsurf applied and display optimization turned on, and finally without display optimization turned on depicting all of the polygons.
One thing to note here is the number of non-regular joins and their location. I don't know how much experience you've had with subsurf modeling, but the concept of edge loops is a pretty big deal, even when you're not dealing with a character destined for organic deformations. Edge loops are continuous flows of four-sided polygons. Anywhere that you have multiple (i.e. more than two: vertical and horizontal) edge loops converging, you typically have a surface irregularity. Sometimes (usually), these create weird warps in your shape and need to be re-thought in order to get the surface to flow correctly. Having some of these irregularities is inevitable, so the trick is figuring out where to place them to make them work for your shape, rather than against it. This isn't really something that can be taught; I can show you general cases and specific examples, but it's been my experience that these are never sufficient to help one deal with individual cases. You just need to think through them. I've noted the irregularities in the above image.
There are also some cases when you can't neatly get rid of all of the irregularities. Sometimes, that calls for going in manually and rebuilding the local geometry by hand, after you've applied your subsurf. Check out the area where the front of the neck meets the hull and extends toward the deflector as a before/after:
All of the geo there was hand-built and massaged into place. To that end, I highly, highly, highly recommend you look into a few Blender add-ons if you're not already using them. LoopTools (Curve, Loft, Space, Relax, and Bridge), EdgeTools (Extend and Slice), and Fillet. I use these three extensively and would be much worse off without them. LoopTools and EdgeTools should come with Blender, and are available in the Specials (w) menu, once enabled in User Preferences > Add Ons. Fillet came from this thread. I'll let you experiment with them to see how they can be applied, but their utility should be obvious pretty quick!
In the other thread, you also asked about Edge Split and Crease and the answer is yes, I use both of these quite extensively.
In fact, I apply the Edge Split modifier to every object, with a 30-40A° split angle. I also use Sharp edges in conjunction with Edge Split for additional control. Sharp edges are one of those "hidden" features that, while technically in plain sight, aren't obvious. Select any edge, hit Space to bring up the tool search menu, and type "Mark Sharp." This will mark the edge as Sharp. As far as I know, this does nothing without the Edge Split modifier. With it, though, it allows you to designate specific edges to break into separate smoothing groups. I use this heavily around my windows -- the first break with the hull is sharp, and so too is the bevel. (Side Note: To remove Sharp from an edge, simply apply Mark Sharp again, but int he Tool parameters check "Clear")
Edge Split sits at the bottom of my modifier stack. My general modifier stack is Mirror > Subsurf > Edge Split while modeling the subsurf portion. Once I'm happy with it, I apply the Mirror, then the Subsurf, delete all of the polygons in one axis, and then re-apply Mirror so that I'm left with Mirror > Edge Split.
Creasing edges figures in extensively while modeling the subsurf portion. In the other thread, you mentioned adding lots of edge loops to get tight corners, and I bet this is your problem. Here's a little pictorial explanation:
That's all I have time for at the moment, but in the next post I'll explain the panels/grid lines, as well as any new questions you want to ask! :thumb:
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Thanks for the tips, I'm going to save this as a document. More, please.
I use edge loops a lot, and sometimes they work, sometimes they produce a sharp edge or crease along an entire object when I just wanted it around part of one, like a panel, hull plate, door, etc.
I wish I knew how to 'massage" things by hand to get a perfect surface. I've tried and usually make a bigger mess. I need to get that down, hopefully there are some video tuts on that somewhere.
Really my skills took a big leap recently, partially thanks to the ebook about bu8ilding a rocket bike, which had lots of neat stuff but didn't cover subsurfing much. I've come to use subsurfing to get some good results, but have found it to be a lot like an assault rifle. I.E. it's a very powerful item that can be very useful and even vital when used correctly in the right circumstances, but if used incorrectly and/or in the wrong circumstances will usually cause the user more grief that good.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
I recommend you read the tutorial Melak posted in addition to what follows, which is the tutorial I wrote up following the discussion with Madkoifish. The ideas are all related.
Modelers--especially Trek modelers--often find themselves needing to etch (shield) grids into their hull surfaces. This isn't unique to Trek models, of course; hull panel lines everywhere and the following applies equally to any sort of inset line on a non-planar surface.
A common approach, which ultimately leads to problems, is to use the existing geometry as a basis for the grid layout. Here we have an eighth of a sphere, which we'll use for demonstration throughout this tutorial. I have colorized it with an alternating red/blue checker pattern to indicate different "hull panels" that I want to etch onto its surface.
What to do from here? A common, but incorrect, approach is to simply extrude along each group's normal. The reason this fails is that it leaves you with wedge-shaped "troughs," rather than nice rectilinear insets.
Note: Many extrusions in this tutorial are highly exaggerated to illustrate what's going on!
The first step on the road to correcting this is to add an inset for each panel. The exact tool will vary with your package (for Blender, it's Inset Faces, for LightWave it's Bevel or Multi-Shift), but the idea is the same. When using inset, you should inset each panel group by half the total gridline thickness. Personally, I like to have grids that are about 5cm wide, so I'd inset 2.5cm, but the exact amounts are up to you. Here's what our octantsphere looks like after insetting.
Tip: You can select all of one particular type of material group (depicted here as blue or red) and inset them in the same operation. This is, in fact, part of why they are grouped in this checkerboard pattern!
Tip: It's also a good idea to give your insets an entirely different material at this juncture for easier selection.
Your instinct now might be to negative extrude your newly minted grid lines and call it a day. While the typical extrusion depth for gridlines of this size will let you get away with it, look what happens when you exaggerate the extrusion depth.
Whoa! Why are our grids so fat now?! The reason has to do with Normals. Every vertex, and by association every face, has a Normal that can be thought of as a ray indicating which way the vertex or face is "facing." When you have a vertex that is shared by multiple faces, its Normal is an average of the associated face normals. (There's actually some duality to this; typically, it is the face that stores Normal data and the vertex normals are derived from this, but not always!) When you extrude as we have here, you're extruding along the Normals computed from our insets and our original topology lines, which were spherical. It's not very different from simply scaling up a sphere, in fact.
Note: Your exact method of extrusion may vary. In Blender, Extrude Region with an offset of 0, and then Shrink/Fatten with an offset of the desired depth will produce the results you see here, and is my recommended approach for this sort of detailing. In LightWave, (proceed with caution, as my knowledge only extends as far as v7) I believe you want to use the Smooth Shift tool produce these results. I can't recall what the 3dsMax or Maya equivalent tools are.
How do we fix this? A first step is to remove the edge loops in the middle of our gridlines, created when we inset the different panel groups. This will get rid of most of this "distortion" (it's not really distortion; it's doing exactly what it should based on the local topology).
Edge loops removed from un-extruded surface.
Resulting extruded surface.
As you can see, the grid lines where we didn't have a grid intersection now look correct. The intersection grids are still fattened, though. Why is this? It's again an issue of pre-existing surface topology and the Normals along which we're extruding our faces. These intersection points are not flat, while our other grid lines are flat.
What makes them different? When we removed the interior edge loops from our pre-extruded insets, we made the grid surface planar. Rather than having an edge loop that cut through the middle, creating non-co-planar (this isn't the same as non-planar, which describes a single surface that is made of two triangles with unequal face normals) surfaces, we have flat surfaces. Because of the 0-offset extrude executed earlier, we removed any association they had with their neighboring polygons, and so they extruded only their face normal without distortion.
However, the intersection polygons are a different story! They have topology information coming from the all of the incoming gridlines: latitudinal and longitutidnal. Whereas the non-intersecting portions of the gridlines have only the neighboring two polygons to influence their vertex normals, the intersections have to juggle vertex normals from four sources, which result in normals that no longer conform to the rigid extrusion angle we want. This image might help make things clearer:
So, how do we fix this? By ensuring that intersections are co-planar with incoming gridlines. This means we can't actually use our underlying geometry's edgeloops as the basis for our grid insets, because whenever we do, we are going to run into a situation where the grid intersections aren't co-planar. Using longitudinal intersections, will get longitudinal distortion, and vice versa for latitudinal intersections.
Here's our octantsphere with completely new lines manually cut in for the grids.
Here's a close up, showing where the panels end vs. where the original geometry lines existed.
Here's our octantsphere with cleaned-up insets.
And finally, the resulting extrusion, free of distortion!
From here, it doesn't hurt to apply a nice micro-bevel to the various edges you've created (each panel surface, and the corner edge of each panel's trough; putting bevels in the troughs is generally a waste of polygons).
The resulting bevel, after a bit of cleanup.
And voila!
As a final note, I use the term "extrusion" a lot throughout the tutorial. In Blender, you actually want to do an extrude with 0 offset, followed by a Shrink/Fatten with the desired offset. Extrude by itself will extrude along the entire selected group's vector, which won't at all do what you want. Shrink/Fatten moves polyons along their individual normals while preserving their vertex relationship. The reason to extrude with 0 offset first is to create new polygons to move around, without disrupting the original borders.
What's next?
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
I ought to send you a copy of the Hephaestus, my best effort, just to use an an example of how to get nearly everything wrong.
Ha! I have a giant amount of archival disk space devoted to wicked old models that all stand as testament to how to get everything wrong.
One of the biggest problems I've had over the years is with screwy reference diagrams. I should write up a post on how I go about correcting the existing diagrams out there. There are few things more irritating when starting a project than finding that your reference diagrams/background images don't align with one another. I'm not talking about simply positioning/scaling them right, but rather the details within each image are clearly placed differently.
I'll put that on my to-do list.
Were there any other specific topics you were curious about?
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Specifically I tried your lighting tips. I guess I have to look up how to set a light to a real world size, but at a light value in the millions all i get is a washed out glare in the shape of my mesh.
Also, on lights, doing glowey parts of a ship, like engine panels, sensor arrays, etc. can be an issue.
As to helping people instead of just mooching aid, here's something I can offer to help people doing TNG ships and wanting to get those phaser array arcs along the hull. making a phaser array is easy, getting it to conform to a 3d hull with various curves is another. Here's the tutorial that helped me a lot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnGW-osN1Vc
I was able to make the phaser arrays on the hull panels here with it:
rearquarter_zps0d265a0b.png
The phaser arcs are perfectly molded to the hull as you can see, following the curves and sweeps perfectly. This could help people mold odd shaped greebles onto a hull and then extrude them out. In some cases you could even greeble hull plates onto a basic mesh and extrude them as you wished. This was a very useful tut for me and I can't recommend it highly enough. Likewise Mr. Draculic extends many other helping hands across the world on many other topics so if you're a blenderhead you should subscribe to his youtube channel.
Do you have your scene size set to Metric? That might be relevant. My Ambassador is just under 500 m long, and my lights are positioned within about a kilometer of it. I have no idea what units the light strength values use, but my suspicion is that by using Metric scene scale, rather than Blender's abstract units, is at least part of why the values are cranked so high.
For some things, like the lights around my bridge and saucer sensor array, these are just some polygons with an Emissive material applied set to about 3.
The warp grilles are a bit different. They have an Emissive material with a strength of 250, using a Color Ramp that goes from black to blue back to black. They're UV'ed from top to bottom per band so that the top of any given one of those blue lines is "black", the middle is "blue", and the bottom is "black" again, the idea being that the middle part of that band is going to be the most energetic.
For things like the deflector, Bussard collectors, and impulse engines, I'll write up little tutorial explaining those. My method for them is probably a lot more involved than really necessary, but I had fun with it.
Aha, that's an interesting trick! I didn't know that one. The way I did the saucer phasers was to just use Snap to Face from the top view with all of the phaser array vertices selected. That method wouldn't work for an array that wrapped around a curvier part of the hull, though, so this method is actually much better, if more involved. I had also forgotten the "select vertex path" trick -- far better than relying on "Edge Loop" select in some cases! Will need to add this to my bag of tricks.
I would have cleaned up the text geometry in his example after remeshing, though. Way too dense for the amount of geometry actually necessary!
I generated the profile curves for my phaser arrays by taking a Circle and using the Spin tool with a wonky axis to, essentially, smear the Circle along the arc of the phaser array. Involved a lot of cleanup, but the resulting shape worked pretty well. From there, it was just a lot of Inset Polygon, Extrude+Shrink/Fatten, and Bevel. I broke with standard Trek modeling conventions and decided to make each emitter a set of three flat plates, as on the 6-foot Galaxy model prior to ILM's refurbishment for Generations and in the TNG Tech Manual, rather than the notched and grooved look they took on in the 4-foot model and the refurbishment done on the 6-foot model Generations and later.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
More tutorials coming soon!
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
In general, prior to applying Subsurf, your main tools are going to be Insert Edge Loop, Edge Slide, Vertex Slide, Extrude, move, rotate, scale, and shear (and sometimes Extend, Curve, Space, Loft, and Relax, depending on the situation). There are occasions for others, but those are the primary ones. After you apply Subsurf is when you start doing crazier things like Booleans, Inset Polygon, Fillet, Bevel, etc.
Another annoying thing about Inset Polygon is the way it behaves around irregular joins. Anywhere subsurf has a problem, Inset Polygon probably will too. One trick I use is to temporarily Split the uniform portion of the area I want to inset, do my inset, and then re-weld all the bits back together. I actually use this trick in a number of places, including with Bevel.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Can you post a before inset/after inset screenshot?
I'll add "write a detailed tutorial on the uses of Inset Polygon" to my to-do list, as well.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Vital Addons: LoopTools, EdgeTools, & Fillet deals with three addon suites that I consider vital to my workflow in Blender. Most other 3D packages also have equivalents to these tools, so while the specifics may not be directly applicable to other packages, the principles should be!
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Post subsurf. BTW, I'm redoing the upper saucer to redo it like your example, with the heavy armor plates made like your example of the cone. The upper section of the saucer is not going to be like most trek ships as it's going to be heavily armored with prominent thick, heavy armor panels covering most of it and no windows.
BTW i will eliminate LOT of verts and polys after applying subsurf bu taking out edge loops where they're not needed.
Straships don't need windows really, the little lights are just there to make them look huge. The rebooted Battlestar Galactica looked more believable without all the armor being compromised by windows.
It may be a matter of image detail/scale, but it also looks like you don't have control curves in a lot of your flat edges. I can't tell if you're using Crease or not (usually displays as purple edges, when Crease display is enabled), but that might also help control your geometry a bit.
I'd love to see a closer view of the control cage and the subsurf of that inset band area, as well. Looks like there's some interesting stuff going on there. My suspicion is that you'd be better served to save some of the detail that seems to be in that area for post-subsurf, depending on how close you plan to get to it. It's a lot easier to deal with insets and things after subsurf, using Bevel, Inset Polygon, and Fillet, than before.
Good.
Yeah, windows are typically a feature intended to provide scale. They're a major structural weakpoint on a spacecraft, especially one intended for combat, though. Numerous small telescope/sensors that connected to internal viewports would be significantly safer.
That said, be careful in dispensing with human scale-implying features entirely. The rebooted BSG looks believable in part because they often show it in the context of other, smaller craft that do have identifiable window features (Raptors and Vipers, specifically) and also because it's littered with surface detail that has implied scale (guns, other greebles, and so on). It wouldn't hurt to put airlocks and space doors on your ship to add a sense of scale, even if you're dispensing with windows. Though structural weakpoints like windows, they are also necessary elements of a spacecraft.
Further, scale-implying features typically need to imply scale relative to humans, which is why windows are a go-to choice. Doors are another good option. Just because we "know" how big a phaser array is, that doesn't make it a feature that implies scale.
Well, it does in two respects: the Tutorials forum, plus the Tutorials section. I'm not sure how posts get added to the Tutorials section; presumably one needs to go through mods to do that.
While trolling around there, I had a look at this tutorial by Melak about an alternative approach to doing windows with less cleanup than the Boolean approach. I think this approach might actually work well in Blender, too, with the difference being that you wouldn't use the Knife with the verts on the guide, but rather you'd use Snap to Face with the template, and then cut/rebuild the geometry around it. Not sure if it'd be faster or slower than cleaning up the Booleans, but it would certainly be cleaner from the outset.
Might try doing it both ways in a piece of test geo and see which ends up being faster.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
e > 0 > enter > Alt S > 0.05
Double-hitting the key for a given axis also lets you extrude exclusively along the extrusion faces normal for that axis. For example, to extrude 5m along the local Z axis, you'd hit e > z > z > 5 (or drag at that point). If you just hit z once, it extrudes along the global z axis, instead.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Alternately, if you want to attach a .blend file, I can look at that, too.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog