Fast galactica style ribs and armour in Max

[biotech]

Just got this idea at work, so I cant back it up with images.

But this should get you a nice ribbed and armoured ship in minutes.

Start off with your basic ship shape, without details, this mesh should have no holes, at this stage if it isnt a poly, turn it into one.

Rename your mesh "Inner hull", clone it making sure you pick copy not instance.

Hide the original, rename the copy "beams", then in edit mode, select ploys, and all, this should highlight the surface, you then want to extrude the surface, how much is up to you, this will be the thickness of your beams.

When you are done, clone it again (copy not instance) hide the beams, rename the copy armour.

Edit and extrude again the same amount, then hide the armour, and unhide the beams.

Create a new box object, this needs to be higher and wider than the ship, and the width needs to be however wide you want your beams to be.

Place this box at the far end of your ship, where you want the first beam to be.

Go to array, turn on preview, and make as many beams as you want, making sure on the preview that they spread out nicely acrross your ship.

When thats done, you should have a ship intersected by many boxes, turn one of them into a mesh, and then attatch all the other boxes so that they are all one object, be carefull not to attatch the ship while you are doing this.

You should now have a load of boxes that are one object, and the copy of your ship thats called beam.

Use boolean on these objects, set on intersection.

This now gives you beams in the shape of your ship, unhide the inner hull and you should see them all neatly raised from that inner hull.

now hide both those, and unhide the armour, you can either edit out some polys in the amour, or make some more shapes to boolean holes into it, but once your armour has holes, unide everything, and you should have your ship, with an inner hull, beams, and armour, all in probably less time than it took me to type this!

[backstept]

this is the same method I used on my Cygnus.

a couple things to note with this method is that you may have places where the ribs are completely covered by the outer armor layer. just delete them altogether since you don't need to keep stuff you don't see

[biotech]

Glad it works for real, I was half expecting someone to try and it and find out it dosnt.

[Sphynx]

Its nice to share this Bio, but it may be better next time to write it down, do some tests at home and produce some images, then post it - it'd be a shame to post this type of tutorial only to find that it doesn't work in practice.

[biotech]

Well it would have been easy enough to delete if it didnt work.

[Hobbes]

I used booleaned ribs as placeholders on the Vanguard class, but I always try to limit my use of booleans in order to not have to worry so much about mesh errors.

[biotech]

Here we go, down and dirty and very very fast.

I present, Battlestar teapotica!

[Denanthor]

...I came home from school and opened this and I have to say if we had some Battlestar Teapoticas on our side we would kick Cylon but.. lol

[JustinDixon]

Actually, fastest way is simply to slice the lines for the ribs, then extrude the ribs out of the hull, or cut the polygons out then extrude.

[BorgMan]

As a matter of fact, this way works for SketchUp as well. Thanx Biotech!