and cut out the RCS notches after I made the HN editable.
But as you said, going back to the base mesh will throw you back quite far.
As for the paint job: Sorry I don't have a suitable tutorial at hand. So I tell you how I do it:
1) Freeze polygon selections to mesh island, that will be UV mapped and edited seperately. The islands depend on which mapping or projection will fit best. For example the saucer's upperside would be one island and the texture is projected flat or frontal from top down. Same with the underside plus rim, or the rim seperately with a cylindrical projection. The selections are freezed to quickly access them in the UV editor.
2) Create a texture map with the desired resolution and apply it to the mesh.
3) In the UV edit layout choose the first polygon selection, e.g. the upper saucer. Change the editor view camera to top view, go into 'Edit UV polygons' mode, apply frontal mapping and in the 2D workspace move the selected UV mesh into a free space. From there start to relax or move/resize/rotate those areas of the UV mesh where you have strong overlaps or where you need more texture space. E.g. the UVs of the saucer's rim have to be flatened because due to the top down maping they are upright.
(Your main hull's mesh density is really high, so tweaking UVs by hand is a PITA. Therefore I recomend to do a first UV unwrapping with the 'un-hypernurbed' mesh.)
4) Same procedure for the remaining mesh selections: Choose a proper projection or do an 'Interactive Mapping' to adjust the texture mapping to the 3D mesh and move it to the side.
5) Arrange/Rezise the UV mesh islands untill they all fit into the 2d canvas.
6) Stamp the whole UV mesh onto a new transparent layer of the texture and save it as PSD.
7) Load the image to Photoshop or any other paint app and start painting or adding your texture elements.
This is the UV map of my Voyager main mesh. (open in new tab for full size)
Thanks for that Nightfever, that post was really helpful.
One of the things I can't figure out is how people draw panels on to the hull. I see on your wireframe that the panel edges go against the grain of the natural hull mesh. Do you draw the patterns as a separate spline before somehow (?) connecting it to the mesh? Just use the knife tool? -
As you can see, a lot of the patterns on the hull I want to do are really curved and can't seem to make nice curved lines after fixing the subd model to create the types of panels that I want.
A good example would be on the Aventine:
See both the saucer and the lower hull/deflector assembly.
Yes, I draw splines for the grid lines, extrude and boolean cut them into the mesh. The most of the work on this is cleaning unwanted edges and vertices after the boolean cut.
For raised hull plates like the ones on the Sovereign I model each plate flat and shrink-wrap them onto the the main hull. For curved plates I also draw splines for the outlines and then patch them with the plugin 'Spline Patch'. But you can also use the method above and cut the edges into the mesh and extrude the polygons from there.
I like that model very much! Really a very fresh and stringent sculpt! :thumb:
Hint: When placing a Boolean-Tag for cut outs etc., I always check its "Hide new edges" option. It cleans a lot by default.
Also thanks to nightfever for the valuable link!
Thanks for all the messages guys.
I've spent a few more days on this and unfortunately, I've got to call time - it was meant to be a sort of active tutorial - a 3ds max to c4d conversion session - I planned for 1 week, ended up spending 3! Ha.
Here's the final image.
I may texture it some day - but I have to move on to a personal project I've been working on, thinking on, dreaming on, for far too long.
its come out as a brilliant shape, probably the best federation ship wip here at present. needs some sort of texture/more hull detial to break up the large blank areas though.
its come out as a brilliant shape, probably the best federation ship wip here at present. needs some sort of texture/more hull detial to break up the large blank areas though.
The hope was to texture it, but like I mentioned I simply ran out of time.
Posts
and cut out the RCS notches after I made the HN editable.
But as you said, going back to the base mesh will throw you back quite far.
As for the paint job: Sorry I don't have a suitable tutorial at hand. So I tell you how I do it:
1) Freeze polygon selections to mesh island, that will be UV mapped and edited seperately. The islands depend on which mapping or projection will fit best. For example the saucer's upperside would be one island and the texture is projected flat or frontal from top down. Same with the underside plus rim, or the rim seperately with a cylindrical projection. The selections are freezed to quickly access them in the UV editor.
2) Create a texture map with the desired resolution and apply it to the mesh.
3) In the UV edit layout choose the first polygon selection, e.g. the upper saucer. Change the editor view camera to top view, go into 'Edit UV polygons' mode, apply frontal mapping and in the 2D workspace move the selected UV mesh into a free space. From there start to relax or move/resize/rotate those areas of the UV mesh where you have strong overlaps or where you need more texture space. E.g. the UVs of the saucer's rim have to be flatened because due to the top down maping they are upright.
(Your main hull's mesh density is really high, so tweaking UVs by hand is a PITA. Therefore I recomend to do a first UV unwrapping with the 'un-hypernurbed' mesh.)
4) Same procedure for the remaining mesh selections: Choose a proper projection or do an 'Interactive Mapping' to adjust the texture mapping to the 3D mesh and move it to the side.
5) Arrange/Rezise the UV mesh islands untill they all fit into the 2d canvas.
6) Stamp the whole UV mesh onto a new transparent layer of the texture and save it as PSD.
7) Load the image to Photoshop or any other paint app and start painting or adding your texture elements.
This is the UV map of my Voyager main mesh. (open in new tab for full size)
One of the things I can't figure out is how people draw panels on to the hull. I see on your wireframe that the panel edges go against the grain of the natural hull mesh. Do you draw the patterns as a separate spline before somehow (?) connecting it to the mesh? Just use the knife tool? -
As you can see, a lot of the patterns on the hull I want to do are really curved and can't seem to make nice curved lines after fixing the subd model to create the types of panels that I want.
A good example would be on the Aventine:
See both the saucer and the lower hull/deflector assembly.
For raised hull plates like the ones on the Sovereign I model each plate flat and shrink-wrap them onto the the main hull. For curved plates I also draw splines for the outlines and then patch them with the plugin 'Spline Patch'. But you can also use the method above and cut the edges into the mesh and extrude the polygons from there.
I'll rebuild the saucer tomorrow and hopefully post something to show you guys how it went.
Whenever I need a certain mesh flow on a model I start with patching splines. So check this plugin out, it's really worth the purchase: http://www.c4dplugin.de/splinepatch/splinepatch_en.html
I tried the spline patch demo night fever, wasn't really working and I'l need to experiment with it later.
Lot's of geometry missing but just compare the quality of the meshes.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
An awesome improvement, well done. :thumb:
:-)
Hint: When placing a Boolean-Tag for cut outs etc., I always check its "Hide new edges" option. It cleans a lot by default.
Also thanks to nightfever for the valuable link!
I've spent a few more days on this and unfortunately, I've got to call time - it was meant to be a sort of active tutorial - a 3ds max to c4d conversion session - I planned for 1 week, ended up spending 3! Ha.
Here's the final image.
I may texture it some day - but I have to move on to a personal project I've been working on, thinking on, dreaming on, for far too long.
That is outstanding progress from where you started. Beautiful work!
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog