Member tuts and/or tips/tricks on BSG Modeling

[Adalla]

Greetings all,

As someone new to 3D, and about to start learning how to model, and since I'm a huge Battlestar Galactica fan and most of my work, especially initially will be in the BSG universe, I'd love to get some tips and advice, or even some tutorials and classes here in the SFM Dojo on modeling BSG ships anything from a Viper to a Battlestar.

There are so many FANTASTIC BSG modelers on SFM, and they make it seem to easy to produce such top notch work. For those of us new and wanting to start modelnig our own BSG ships, we'd love some pointers.

Some questions that I have right of the top of my head are:

a) How do you get those panels and armor plates on there. My guess are simple extrusions, but I'd like to hear more about how basically you "surface" the ship with those plates etc.

b) How do you organize yourself for big projects like a Battlestar? do you have like 100 layers for each part of the ship? Like a layer for the flight pods, maybe you divide the main ship hull into several parts? Where do you start to model something so big and complex, and how do you keep track of it all?

c) How do you create interiors, like the cockpit of a viper or the interior of a Raptor? how do you put that hole in there?

d) How would you deal with say a Raptor's cockpit canopy frame/window? Do you extrude the windows and let the frame stand out?

That should do for now. Of course I'm going to start simple and small, like doing my own Mark 2, and then moving on to a Raptor, and then a mid-sized ship maybe, and then build my way up to a Battlestar.

Any tips/advice/pointers are very welcome and appreciated. If any of you BSG modelers wrote any tuts, if you could point the way that'd be great too.

With so many amazing BSG modelers, I hope we can eventually get some tutorials from some of them, cause that'd help new folks like me a lot, and help our BSG family grow

Thanx a lot

Adalla

[Melak]

Hi there. It's probably unlikely that you will find tutorials specialized on the modelling of a viper.
I'll try and answer your question as good as I can, though spome of it might be a bit generalised

a) There are a couple of paneling tutorials on this site, and another good one on MadKoiFish's site: Tutorials The madFish Way!
I believe all these are for 3ds Max, but they should give you an idea where to start in Lightwave

b) Having sketched the layout on paper often helped me visualise the ship before I attempt building it. Giving that idea in your mind a little more shape, exploring ways it could work before you go 3D can make it a lot easier.
By the time you finally got something sketched that you like and represents your original idea,
you'll know the design like that back of your hand.
From there it's just a matter of buiding a rough represenation in 3D (with subdivision modelling for example) and refining it. Once you have the overall shape fleshed out, having each part on it's own layer isn't far fetched. Could have an additional layer for panels, and another for weapons...really depends on the amount fo detail you put into it.

c) Depends on the way the model is built. 2 probable ways are to include the hole in the rough subdivision mesh, or boolean/cut it out of the smoothed shape.

d) That's pretty much I would do it, cut in the shape and extrude/bevel/whatever it's called


If you didn't already, you should definitly look into subD modelling, there seems to be a whole forum dedicated to sharing different methods for different applications here: Subdivision Modeling - Powered by vBulletin

Good luck

[Adalla]

Thanx for the help m8. I hope eventually we'll see a lot more tuts and "classes" from the BSG and Star Trek experts on this site, there seems to be so many. I'm sure at least a few would be willing to teach others.

[mJAstro]

MOST of the things they do are the basics adapted to what they are modeling. Go through all the many basic tuts around the net for your program and you will learn the tools needed to make the more complex models. The reason you don't find such specific tuts is because of this. Pretty sure there is a beginner thread somewhere on this site.

[spudmonkey]

Originally Posted by mJAstro

MOST of the things they do are the basics adapted to what they are modeling.

Exactly this! There are many different ways to model the same thing and a lot of learning 3d modeling is working out which ways work best for you. My normal advice to someone learning 3d is to build something, then build it again and again using different methods. You will find that you improve with each rebuild and will find which techniques you prefer and which give the best results for each things you try to model