Autodesk 11 - Hull it

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Probably me being thick with the search engine but I could find no tutorials on creating ship hulls for 3DS Max, apart from a couple of old ones where the pics were missing. Having upgraded to 11 from 7 I decided to trial and error and see if I could come up with a better way than I had managed to date.

It soon became obvious Autodesk 11 does not like Vista, it crashes, it runs out of memory, it sulks. On a much poorer spec XP machine it runs like a dream, hope to try it on Windows 7 soon and will report on that.

First disappointment is as usual no amount of fiddling will produce a decent representation of the plans, I did find though that mapping them in the horizontal and then rotating if required gave better resolution for some reason. I am using Jecobin plan, side and bulkheads mapped onto planes, the side and plan are frozen most of the time but the bulkhead is free to move and I swipe it along the length of the hull as required.

I start modelling with a cylinder, length segments set to match the number of bulkheads, so as I have 13 bulkheads I set the length segments to 12. Sides is not critical but it helps to have an odd number so you have a point at the bottom, I set mine to 19. I then sliced off the top half and then the starboard side and applied a symmatry modifier to give me a rough hull shape. I then swipe the bulkhead plan forward and adjust the vertices, concentrating on the horizontal position except where I have to alter the vertical too.

I do not care at this stage that the hull segments are in the wrong place as they have been created equidistant and the bulkheads are not, I can sort that later.

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I swipe the bulkhead plan back to each segment, exposing the vertices for each as I go and altering them to fit, no need to be too anal at this stage, never mind if there are big curves being short cutted. This goes on until I reach the centre of the ship.

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Once the centre has been reached I rotate the bulkhead plan 180 deg and change to work from the stern, repeating the same procedure, exposing one set of vertices at a time and altering mainly in the horizontal to try and keep the created lines as smooth as possible.

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Here you can see the actual view I use to work with the vertices, seen from the stern, currently working on Bulkhead 10

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It is surprisingly quick to produce a low polygon hull with this method, the bow I have deliberately left, I always have problems with that!

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To position the bulkheads in the right area I came up with a simple method, I grab each group of vertices and move them in the top view until they line up with the hull outline. You can always improve on this by measuring the actual location on the plan and applying that to the model, but I found this gave a better result!

This pic shows that despite careful measuring of the plane the ship plan is distorted, that large oval on the left should be a circle, the Ikara Zareba, or launcher bay. Not to worry, that can easilly be fixed with a tweak of the scaling tool, I will do that later.

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My low polygon hull is starting to look something like now.

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I will be smoothing the hull so at this point I apply a Turbosmooth modifier, but keep it seperate so I can just switch it on now and then to check how things are coming on. Here it is activated on the low polygon draft.

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Now the dreaded bow. I strart by extending the top edge of the end of the cylinder, stepping it to form 4 segments, that is not a magical number, it just looked about right.

Then I select the vertical edges and extend a segment at a time, welding the top vertices to the edge of each of the horizontal segments as I go.

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Once I had the hull shape roughly in place I found the top faces hampering me trying to shape the bow up better so I deleted them, I then found it a lot easier to get a cleaner shape as seen here.

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I now create the deck by the simple means of extending the edge of the cylinder to the centre for each segment and welding the central vertices to each other as I go. This is the beauty of keeping the polygon count low at this stage, not too much work to do!

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My hull now has a workable deck in place.

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Okay, time to start improving the shape. First take a look at the bow, the biggest descrepency is the lower part of the hull, we are using the bulkhead lines on the right of the plan here.

Selecting an edge in the area and then applying a loop (Modify Selection) to select all the edges and then a multiple connect (Loops menu) I add additional polygons and vertices to allow me to fine tune the shape.

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Filling in the worse gaps produces a smooth hull with a still relative small polygon count.

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Now time to check out the stern. In low polygon mode all looks well...

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But apply the Turbosmooth and "Oh Dear!"

Note also the swirl on the deck section midships, a sure sign I have missed welding a pair, or overlapped a couple of vertices.

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Joining the hull lines across the stern with the cutting tool improves the situation, but it is still not right, I have also fixed the deck fault...

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To improve the shape of the stern I add a couple of cuts close to the demarkation of hull and stern, when smooth is applied as here the result is a much better defined stern...

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And here is the smoothed bow, this is where I had lots of problems with my previous attempt and never really got it right, the rather complex curves of the hull section just never came together for me, this is a huge improvement for me.

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Last actions before applying the Turbsmooth and symmatry for good:

I have used extrude tool to extend out the main keel, the bilge keels and the shaft housings, I have also used a tapered cylinder to punch out the bull nose with the Boolean tool. Turbosmooth and Symmatry are now applied.