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Phaser array strip in blender?

Judge Death.Judge Death.1 Posts: 0Member
I'm modelling a starship in the Trek TNG era where they have those phaser array strips along the hull. Any advice on modelling those onto various curved hulls? I've used the shrinkwrap command to paste a basic form to a hull cection and them mold it to shape but are there any better methods?
Post edited by Judge Death. on
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  • nightfevernightfever361 Posts: 585Member
    I'm not a Blender user, but in C4D I use a spline projected on the surface as guide for deformations, extrusions or multiplications.
  • Judge Death.Judge Death.1 Posts: 0Member
    Here's my latest versions made using shrinkwrap and extrusion.

    Screenshot (39).jpg

    Screenshot (30).jpg

    Screenshot (42).jpg

    Screenshot (43).jpg

    The glowing red panels are not phaser emitters, they are thermal vents that radiate waste heat to space. Phaser cooling has always been an issue in star trel technology, starting with the deadly phaser coolant gas seen in "Balance of terror". There help manage phaser overheating somewhat.

    I colored them bronze as part of the ship's overall theme, which is that it is built and designed using federation tech but by a different men taluty with different design philosophies and intentions.
    111256.jpg111257.jpg111258.jpg111259.jpg
  • Vortex5972Vortex5972321 Posts: 1,202Member
    Those are looking good. I was going to link you to BBbelts Akira series, but I see you've already found it.
  • McCMcC373 Posts: 704Member
    What you're doing is essentially the way I do it.

    Here's a detailed example of one of mine, done in the Sovereign-class style.

    coro_2017-02-21-1129.jpg

    It starts with a circle with a specific number of vertices depending on how thick I want the beam emitter insets to be, the width of which I then carry forward into the various segments that span the length of the strip. I tend to just default to 3 meters for the width of a phaser strip, based on the TNG Technical Manual and visual scaling from various screenshots. Each emitter notch is somewhere between 20 and 30 cm wide (again, based on visual scaling of the number of notches compared against other features with known size), so I generally go with a circle with 56 edges or so, for 28 per cap, and then use two segments per cap emitter, so the end up being a hair over 30 cm around the periphery, but shrink down to the right size after insetting (will get to that in a moment).

    Of course, I do all of this because I ridiculously overthink everything and this level of nonsense is not necessary for most people. :D

    It's important to make sure the semicircle "cap" part is angled well in comparison to the average normal of the hull surface it's going to snap to, or you'll get some weird distortion and the cap will end up looking correctly round from one angle, but stretched or squashed from others. Shrink Wrap might actually handle this better than simply turning on Snapping with Face as the Snap Target, which is what I normally do.

    Create enough subdivisions in the polygon that connects your two end cap semicircles so that it roughly matches the emitter width established earlier, then snap the mesh to the face to get your base phaser geometry. The number of subdivisions is important here, though, because you're going to need the "pattern" to work out later. Make sure you go with an even number.

    At this point, I use Inset Faces to create the contour shape, following this pattern:
         _  ~.5m across | bevel edge at 0.025
       _|   0.0785m inset |  0.0785m shallow extrude | bevel base at 0.01 | bevel slope edge at 0.025
     _/ .21m (7%*3m) inset | 0.554m up, .96m (32%*3m) in (makes 30A° incline)
    | 0.5m, bevel top at 0.1
    

    Written out as instructions:
    • Inset Faces with Depth 0.5 (extruding "out") on the base curve. In truth, it's usually better to Inset Faces "up" 0.25 and "down" 0.25, so you give yourself a little slack at the hull intersection. Only 0.25m sticks out of the hull in my screenshot above.
    • Inset Faces on the "outer" polygons 0.21m.
    • Inset Faces on these polygons again, using 0.554m "up" and 0.96m "in" to make the actual phaser bulge
    • Inset Faces on the top ridge another 0.0785m in
    • Inset Faces on these polygons another 0.0785 up
    • Select all of the angled edge loops and bevel them with a small bevel. You can vary it per edge (as in the notes above) or just choose a single value that looks good (I usually end up doing this)

    The final step is to go through and -- one-by-one -- stagger-select the emitter polygons (remember to select pairs of them on the caps, since they're two faces per actual emitter width), then run Inset Faces twice: first with a small inset of 0.02m in, 0.01m "down" to create a nice micro-bevel, then with a large depth inset of 0.05m in, 0.25m "down" to create the emitter well itself.

    That's just one visual style, though. Depending on the era you're going for, there are all sorts: Intrepid style, Galaxy style, Sovereign style (what the above are based on), etc.

    One method I'm curious to try at some point in the future, to do something like the Galaxy style shown above, is to combine a single modeled segment and a Bezier curve with the Array and Curve modifiers, to get that sort of high-detail emitter notch look without going out of my mind.

    Hope this helps!
  • Judge Death.Judge Death.1 Posts: 0Member
    I'm gratified i evolved the same method you did, McC.

    One question: How did you like my idea of adding thermal radiators to the phaser array to aid cooling and the reasons I gave for it?
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