3D Modeling tutorial questions.

[Gammel]

It's funny you bought up the points that you did. And I'll say why:
Originally the cockpit section was bigger. One of the reasons I didn't go with that look was because I couldn't get it to look that way it did in my head. That was a bit frustrating, and I changed the design. But I guess your right in saying that with the engines being smaller than the cockpit section does make it look like a fighter.
The cockpit section was more of a 'T' shape originally, with only one of those rings, (or at least half a ring) in a horizontal orientation.
Also the thing on the top of the cockpit section was really more of an after thought, that anything.
The other ideas are cool, good to increase detail.
I should really upload these, so you guys can see whats inside them, and maybe even make changes that I can see and play with myself.

I was thinking today, at work, and I decided that, as much as I appreciate you guys critiquing my ships, aesthetically, it's not really helping me get better at making them. (Don't get me wrong, I take all the advice on board. Its great!)
What I need is advice on my methods and use of gmax. So What I figured Id do, is make a small object. And post a post, in great detail, on how I made it. Complete with screen shots and everything, So you guys can see how I'm doing stuff and then you can tell me easier, better and more accurate ways of doing things.

One of my main problems, when making a ship, is that I have an idea on what I want. But I have trouble putting what I have in my head, into gmax. If I can bridge that gap, I believe my ship designs will improve greatly.

Thoughts?

[bladedranger]

I was thinking today, at work, and I decided that, as much as I appreciate you guys critiquing my ships, aesthetically, it's not really helping me get better at making them. (Don't get me wrong, I take all the advice on board. Its great!)
What I need is advice on my methods and use of gmax. So What I figured Id do, is make a small object. And post a post, in great detail, on how I made it. Complete with screen shots and everything, So you guys can see how I'm doing stuff and then you can tell me easier, better and more accurate ways of doing things.

Thats fair enough and i will be sure to read your looooooong and detailed post if you get round to doing it

One of my main problems, when making a ship, is that I have an idea on what I want. But I have trouble putting what I have in my head, into gmax. If I can bridge that gap, I believe my ship designs will improve greatly.

That will just take time. i remember having ideas and then thinking of ways i will model it then getting into the software and thinking OMG WTF THATS UBER HARD an example was modeling Construct from Halo 3 i wasnt at the point of being able to do it but now after more practice and experience i have the main outer shell modelled

[Killjaeden]

It helps you if someone says how to improve the design - you just don't recognize it ;D

I always make a scetch on paper for any ship i want to build...
Because it's difficult to go directly from head->3d

[Gammel]

Yeah, true.
When I come up with something in gmax, you guys will be the first to critique it. So don't worry,. I just want to brush up on my methods.

I have been sketching a few things when I make my ships. Just to see how some of the ideas. As well as collecting many pics for inspiration. It sure is nice when you get blueprints of ships. That's always good to see.

[Gammel]

Holy crap life has been busy for me at the moment. I wanna devote a lot of time to this, but the amount of stuff I am doing lately has dropped to a crawl. I still want to write up that tute thing I mentioned before, to get decent feedback on my methods. But it was very time consuming. I figured I had better get to building a ship first, polish later.
http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f295/ ... ship09.png
Anyway, here's another ship. It's unfinished, of course, I just wanted to show it off somewhat. I can't seem to figure out what I want to do with it. I've sorta gotten a bit of a mental block on it.

Any ideas?

[Killjaeden]

Again - Big Engines, small tiny mainframe ^^

maybe you can make a fin out of the rear thing (make it wider)
and the cockpit&cargosection wider too. the connection can stay like that.

Maybe you should try to build a Model that has the engine inside of the body

Simple shape but detailed faces (details by 'boolean-ing' small objects into it) ...

[Gammel]

Yeah, now that you mention it.
I wanted to add more to the main hull, but I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do. So I ended up starting another ship instead.

I've tried taking an object, and boolean-ing objects into it. But if I try to boolean more than a couple objects into in, things start going a bit weird. I get weird edges going all over the place, that I cant delete, and odd floating vertices. It all becomes quite confusing.

[Killjaeden]

I used this technique on the middlesection of the pirate M6 i'm (still ) doing.
I placed the small objects into the cutting postition and merged all objects to one mesh and then i used boolean.
Of course you need to clean it up afterwards.

The middlesection that recieved the boolean cuts had a smaller one inside that wasn't influenced. I'm going to make some screens.

[ external image ][ external image ]
The green section is a scaled copy of the blue part before it was 'booled'
boolean objects are were just a few boxes/ box-formations

you can also do a hull with a few plates on them by using the cut tool and extrude (only a little bit)

[Gammel]

Aaah, ok. I kinda figured that if you attach together all the parts your going to use to boolean into your original object, then it gets a bit of a better result.
With that part you have there, what did you do to clean it up?
Sometimes I end up with 'edges' that go from one random vertex to another. They don't seem to have anything to do with the shape of the object, and they just wont delete either. what do I do with them?

[Gammel]

I hate to do double posts, but otherwise this thread quickly vanishes off the bottom of the page and into thread oblivion.
I dunno if the thread pops up but to the top when someone modifies their post, probably not.


Anyway, here's yet another ship.
http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f295/ ... ship10.png
Not much left to do with it. I want to see what it would be like if I added a another module behind the cockpit module. Something that I wanted to make different depending on which model of the ship it would be. Raider model would have a large extra engine there, Hauler model would have cargo module there, Vanguard version would have a weapon module, and Sentinel would have a shield module.
But this is how it looks at present. I might also shrink the orange wings.
I'm aiming for the M3 class.

Would you buy this ship?

[Killjaeden]

Could be some sort of paranid design. Looks nice, i like it alot more then the previous - but again the cockpit is too tiny *g*
have the heart to make it bigger. A X space ship isn't a jetfighter where you just have a seat and instruments and as few place as possible because of aerodynamics... there have to be cargoroom too an propably some (very small) furniture to live on that ship.

Maybe i give you a comparison to cars if that helps (of course it's how i imagine the dimensions of fighters)

M5 - some sort of SUV.
M4 - like a van
M3 - a Truck with plenty of cargospace and generators for laser shield and engines. The space for peoples is very limited, like the 'driversection' (don't know how to call) but you can actually sleep and 2 persons can move in there like in a real intercity transport truck

Again to your latest design - you won't destroy the look/design if you make the cockpit bigger and move the 'sidewings' apart a bit.

I would make the nose of the cockpitsection longer and extend in bottomdirection and also to the side. You shouldn't change the size of the cockpitglass because if you scale it up it wouldn't have any impact on the feeling.
I'll make a picture and edit, check out in a couple of minutes again.

€dit:
[ external image ]

Aaah, ok. I kinda figured that if you attach together all the parts your going to use to boolean into your original object, then it gets a bit of a better result.
With that part you have there, what did you do to clean it up?

Manually moving vertices, cutting, deleting lines (you can remove a line with the the delete/remove-button (something like that) in edit poly - the line will be deleted but the face will not (face will be deleted when deleting a line with 'DEL' key). You have to optimise it - less polygons/faces as possible. And of course repair some issues if there are any (overlapping faces or something like that)

[Gammel]

Its funny you should compare the fighter classes to cars and trucks. I always figured they were just single seat fighters. The fact the player never needed to stop to sleep, or pee, was just down to the magic of video gaming. I always figured they had no living space in them at all. If you wanted living space you should have gotten yourself a stylish M6, Something with starview bedrooms, with en suite bathrooms, 24hour kitchen facilities, indoor squash court and automated cocktail bar.
Uuuuhh... moving right along?
But considering how many floating bailed pirates you could stuff into your hold, (when you wanted to make money off selling them as slaves) I guess what your saying does make sense. Odd how I have never thought of it before.
So, Magga Monkey made the Delta Flyer an M3. And looking at this cut-away picture of the ship, there is a fair bit of room in there.

Now I better understand why every time I tried to make an M3, you'd see it as an M5. I guess I'm still stuck with X2 designs in my head. Ships in X2 were pretty much a cokpit with engines stuck to the sides of them.
But, anyway, I'm going to modify this ship, cause I like the design also. And I'll keep these ideas in mind for future fighters.
Thanks.

[Gammel]

Ok, I've made a few changes. As well as added the parts behind the cockpit section I said there were supposed to be. I may still make a few changes back there. Cause I want to make it seem like that part back there is modified depending on which model you (the player) buys.
http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f295/ ... 0_mkII.png
I just noticed its a little difficult to see some of the detail.
So here's a bigger pic of the back section:
http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f295/ ... tail01.png
9574 Polygons
5733 Vertices
If you feel like you want to have a poke around at how I made it. I could get my wife to host it up on her domain, then you could grab it and pull it apart.

Thoughts?

[Killjaeden]

The details look very good. Great job! congrats

However the cockpit doesn't really fit the rest of the ship because it has hard edges whereas the frame around the cockpit is all smoothed.
I suggest to change the cockpit. round window, rounded top and bottomside of the front.

Maybe you could take a look at my picture again. The cockpit has still sharp edges (on the side) but is rounded on top&bottom (don't know how to describe it better)
The size is good, i would keep it that big.

[Gammel]

I thought that myself, actually. Wasn't sure how I could fix it, or how I was going to go about making a new one.
Thinking about it, it would almost be easier replacing the wings with a harder more angular design.

[Killjaeden]

imo replacing the wings isn't an option...
maybe it would be a better way to build a new cockpit and save the other one for another design.

like is said a couple of posts before:

I have an additional advice:
Don't tarry to rethink/restart your idea if you get stuck and when you are not happy with the current.
Same happened to me. I wanted to create an argon-like ship, but got stuck with the first shape because it was too boxy - no detail or 'intrude' would help to repair it.
first try -> second try (isn't as far in priogress as the first but feels a lot better)
[ external image ][ external image ]

[Gammel]

Here's something I forgot to ask last time I saw these two pics.
I get the first pic, it makes sense to me. But whats going on in the second? Whats those thick lines all over it?

[Killjaeden]

They are splines. I tried to make the body via splines but it's too compicated imo. So i used polygonediting to build the shape. I left the splines so it's easier to see the shape, nothing else I deleted them afterwards.

[Gammel]

I thought so.
I read a tute that I think used that way of editing. It was weird. Sort of just drawing a handful of lines and letting the program fill in the blanks.

I know I cant (legally) get a hold of 3DS Max, or at least the latest version. But what about older versions of the program? Like pre-2005, to name a date. Anyone know Autodesk's policy on using the programs they no longer support?

[Killjaeden]

I read a tute that I think used that way of editing. It was weird. Sort of just drawing a handful of lines and letting the program fill in the blanks.

Yeah but drawing those lines is a complicated (imo) as using polygontechniques.
If you want to create a 'rotational solid' it's nice because you need only ONE line... don't know if this works with gmax

But what about older versions of the program? Like pre-2005, to name a date.

Don't know but i've heard something about second-hand licenses
I have a student license but if you aren't a student anymore this is not an option...
Don't know if it's worth it if you only want to create shipmodels for X3...