Quote:
Originally Posted by Starship  Already been cut? Man, they´re appears very clean and smoothed. 
Ca I ask you a little more? Just curious about the way you do it. 
Were they shapemerged or a manual cut? Still in this line: the windows will be shapemerged, cut one by one, or just managing specific pollys with bevel?
kinddest regards! |
I laid out the panel lines using splines, making sure to use a high enough number of smoothing iterations, then extruded them into 3D shapes. I then boolean subtracted them from the hull objects. The result was a bit messy and required considerable vertex cleanup, but it wasn't as bad as the result you typically get from shapemerging.
I actually agonized over this step in the process for quite a while. One of the reasons this project has been dormant for so long is because I knew what I wanted to do but I had no idea how best to accomplish it. I thought about modeling the hull plates individually using Sub-D's or spline cages or even NURBS, but I kept running up against massive polygon overkill and problems with the curvature and alignment of the plates. In the end, simply cutting the gaps into the existing mesh seemed to be the least objectionable method.
As for windows, I will probably use pretty much the same method, although some further subdivision of the polygons that contain the windows will probably be required to avoid long, skinny triangles and the smoothing distortions they cause. Once they are cut, I will extrude them inward, probably without any additional beveling. I find that beveling window edges on a ship this size just isn't worth the effort unless your doing some very closeup renders, in which case I'd be more likely to build a special-purpose, high-detail model of the hull section in question rather than do the whole ship that way.
Also, I may wind up saving the windows until the very end to better facilitate the process of converting the mesh into a 3D printed physical model. Apparently details like windows are better added by hand after the basic parts have been mastered.