I'm starting a thread on this one as it should be a fairly substantial build. I'm probably going to do a casement interior.
Got some gunports on the fore and aft now. I'm going to do a lot of mesh segmenting to break up the casement and hull for easier application of smoothgroups. Right now the basic hull looks 'done' but that is probably a tad deceiving as I've got to engineer the interior of the casement and pilothouse and get it to all blend seamlessly into the hull yet
Coming along nicely! I'm definitely looking forward to seeing how you go about doing the cutaway and interior.
One question though. I noticed some difference in shading on some surfaces on my model and noticed it on yours too. What's that all about, does it have to do with the face directions (normals) or what?
That is going to be either normals changes or, possibly more likely, changes in whether the surfaces are treated as 'smooth' or 'Flat' shading. Flat works best for things like the casement, where you need flat, even surfaces. Smooth is great for giving a bit of blend and not having to use the subsurf modifier.
I've done that with the Tennessee, and I'll have to do a few test renders to see if I can get away with it in renders. the difference between the two might be too noticeable on a high-quality render. Otherwise, I'd have to shade it all smooth to hide the facets in the curve of the hull around the bow and stern. But that would soften the lines of the casement, which would mean creasing all the lines there. I'll have to check that out in Cycles and see if it works!
OK, just wasn't sure if that was normal when smooth shading or if it was something I was doing wrong.
tea monster wrote: Otherwise, I'd have to shade it all smooth to hide the facets in the curve of the hull around the bow and stern. But that would soften the lines of the casement, which would mean creasing all the lines there.
Would that be a case where you could use either the split edges modifier, or crease on the casement, or is using crease a better option for that? (Curious newbie question)
I used crease, only because the subsurf and the edge modifier wasn't doing it for me in this case. Usually you would use those two and either use edge angle or 'marked as sharp' to break the edges. You can also manually split edges to get the same effect as the split-edge modifier. It just makes things awkward if you want to go back and fiddle with it later.
I've put this together for Dean, as it shows some of how I've approached putting the hull together. It's awkward in that the sides have to be be curved and the sides have to be very flat and that can cause problems with normals. So I've wound up applying a sub-surf modifier and now I've creased the major edges to keep them 'square'.
Here's a shot.
The area in front of the casement is still messy (nobody will notice that triangle, especially when it gets turned into a quad when the mirror modifier is applied )
Once I've got this bit done, I can start thinking about the casement interior!
tea monster wrote:
I've put this together for Dean, as it shows some of how I've approached putting the hull together.
Well, thank you.
Pics with simple explanations like that are extremely helpful, especially so because I actually know what your talking about now.
Since you plan on doing the interior (with cutaway?), would it be easier keeping the casement sharp (and less problems with the cutaway) if it was separate from the hull? Just wondering.
That would be the case, but when you apply the sub-surf to one part of the mesh, it distorts it slightly to get the 'curve'. It basically plots a smooth curve between the normal vertices of your mesh. Unfortuately, when it does that, it leaves gaps between the smoothed mesh and the non-smoothed mesh. In certain instances you can get away with it if you build it in a certain way, but I went for speed and just creased what I needed.
I did try to separate the casement, but I got breaks between the curve of the sides of the hull and the casement.
One thing I've forgotten to add in the last pic is that I've dropped a lot of 'control lines' in on the lateral lines of the hull to get a nice sharp line between the deck and the sides.
Actually. The grate wasn't too bad. I just created a beam, arrayed it, then duped and rotated and then booleaned. Saying that, the mesh is a tad messy, so I think I'm going to create a 'cell' and just array it in two directions.
The real pig was the gunports. I had no joy with the snap feature, so I had to dupe the gunport mesh from the outside and shrinkwrap it to the interior casement (after a bit of scale up). Then I used the bridge tool to 'fill in the blanks'.
I'm curious, are you planning on using a bevel modifier to break up the sharp edges, or do it manually? Or just leave them sharp and let the textures take care of it? The reason I ask is I have a similar situation with the Palmetto State, where I just added a radius to the sharp edges. Granted, I'm modeling it in SolidWorks and not Blender, but I'd still like to know how you plan on doing it for future reference.
I may use the bevel modifier. Blender's modelling tools are very much in flux at the moment. To be honest, they are making a new Open movie, and everyone has been pulled off modelling tools to work on that. So they have their new mesh system in place, and some new tools for it, but the tool chest has quite a few gaps yet. I'll have to try it and see how it goes.
The textures are going to be interesting. I've assumed till now that I'm going to be just applying a bump to get it looking good for the iron plates, but the more I think about it, the more I'm thinking that actually arraying some plates along the side may be actually less work, and look better, than trying to get all the different UV sets for the different sides of the casement to match up together. Again, it's going to take some tests to see what works best.
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