Modelling on curved surfaces. Help!!

[satya]

Hi! everybody, posting after some time.

Please help me to model. Say I want to model some greebles on a hull or a curved surface of a ship. How can I achieve that?
Either split polygons on the surface. Or, model it separately and bend it to fit on the surface.

Please help me! I use MaYa and 3ds max.

~THANKS!!

[darkprince]

not sure bout maya but in max u can do it so many ways its not funny.

try copying your basic hull mesh and duplicate it. apply push modifier then convert to editable mesh. then draw ur patters with lines. make lines renderable with whatever thickness you want and scale them so they cut through your model. convert the lines to editable mesh and use a booleon.

model the panels the shape you want flat first then bend them around the model using modifiers. FFD box will work if they are high density. theres a modifier that will fit them onto the mesh (cant remember its name some 1 plz help <conform i think????)

could try the greeble plug-in. <sum 1 got link??? cant remember that either.

another tricky method is to draw the panels with splines and curve the splines to match shape curve. then shell or extrude or whatever with them.

[satya]

Thanks a lot!!!! darkprince!

but after booleaning it generally becomes mesh heavy.

And please tell me more about the modifier!!!!
and also greeble plugin.
~thanks

[Nadesico]

lightwave has a drill method called "Core" which applies a flat plane shape onto a cylindrical or sphereical object, maybe Max or Maya has a similar function in their toolkit.

[1of33]

take the part of your model that you want to panel
clone it then cut it up to the shapes that you want
then add a shell modifier so you can get the depth that you want
and that should be it. if you need an more help send me a PM

[Coolhand]

don't bother shelling it, that'll give you loads of backfaces that you don't need.

extruding the panels will give the same effect without the unneeded polys. you can also control the amount of inset if required, and easily add another bevel if you want a slight rounding effect. Just use cut, slice and quickslice to cut your shapes where needed, booleans are a bad way of making this type of feature, giving you loads of clean up, and don't even try ffd'ing panels to fit, you'll drive yourself mad getting them to fit and even then they'll look untidy.

copy, cut, extrude is all you need

[satya]

Thank a lot !!!!!!

Guess I will follow the same procedure.
Is there any topology brush kinda thing in max???

But if any plugin or modifier is present in max 8, please let me know!

[Jedilaw]

To paraphrase the Beatles: "All you need is cut."