SketchUp is a very low-poly program at it's core, and you, reader, have probably notcied that there isn't a different light source to choose from. This is, unfortunatley, correct, but perhaps this can be solved by using plug-ins, which can be downloaded from
here, but do remind that you need SketchUp Pro 5 for plugins to work. On a different note, some tools that I use aren't standard enabled in SketchUp Free, but they are there; fiddle around a bit with the Window menu and the Preferences tab there. For example, changing your length from inches to meters can be done there, a nice thing for us Europeans
Anyway, we're going on with
Going into Detail: a try to work around SketchUp's low-poly nature
We'll start a fresh mesh for this one. First, create a Circle from which we'll work from, and then up the Section count by left clicking on the circle, selecting Entity Info and change the value of Segments. This will add or decrease the number of segments a closed line has. The higher the number, the less fragmentation you'll see, but the more sheer processorpower it takes to render something.
Our circle is now a lot more smoother, so let's now make an ovuloid out of it. First, if you didn't have your circle selected anymore, Select it again, and click the Scale tool, located beneath the Rotate tool. You'll see that a field of yellow surronds your circle with little green boxes on it. Clicking on one of these will start changing the shape of your circle, but as we want an ovuloid, let's start by clicking the CTRL button; this makes sure that we're morphing the circle from the centre. Hitting Shift will make it bigger proportionally, while just clicking on one of the side boxes without hitting anything else will also make an ovuloid, but with the opposite end as a starting point instead of the centre.
So from this shape:
to this one:
Now that we have our basic shape to work from, let's continue with the saucer itself. Take the shortest point from Centre to Edge on your ovuloid, and create a rectangle on it that will serve as our *canvas* on which we'll draw the outline of the saucer. I learned from the Scifi-Eric tutorial how to make a pretty clean saucer, so we'll do something like that here too. Notice that, when using the Arc tool, you'll sometimes get a blue line. This means that you'll get the perfect transition from one side to another, which also means that you won't get fragmentation at the point where one arc goes over into another. So, when we're done making up an interesting shape, it should look something like this:
Next, the same trick we did before: select line that makes up our circle, and then click on the shape of our saucer cross-section. If you're into making a complete interrior for your ship, I'd suggest that you already create holes on this cross section that will later on become your corridors. Remember that the avarage deck varies between the 3.8 and the 4.5 meters. This would include jefferies tubes.
Uh oh... something seems to be messed up!
Hmm. So it turns out that when using an ovuloid as basic shape, weird things happen in SU. Hmm... Well, fellow SU modellers, have no fear. First, left-click your just-formed hull and hit Intersect with Model. SU will now connect every face that cross-connects with eachother, making them easily editable. Next, delete all the things that come out of our hull. It's bound to happen that a few lines will have to stay, but that's okay. You won't see them when we turn of the Edges. Notice that sometimes when you erase a line, your hull will be broken open. Undo your last erase (CTRL-Z is your friend
), and delete segments easy on. Big chance that SU will know delete your desired line as if nothing is wrong, while last time it also deleted a piece of hull. I don't know how this can happen, but let's just put it away as a bug for now. When you're done deleting, you should get something along these line:
Let the part on the right be for what it is, it'll be cut off when we're prepping our ship for mirroring anyway. So voila, your first, eliptic shaped saucer
