Ordinarily, I wouldn’t bother rendering images and posting an update for this little bit of progress, but these stupid RCS thrusters have been kicking my butt in a big way. The stripes were easy, I booleans intersected them with a nacelle body that was very slightly larger than the actual nacelle body. After that, I just had to do a tiny bit of smoothing error cleanup and I was set. The RCS thrusters, meanwhile, were a different story. Same deal, booleans intersect them with a slightly larger nacelle body (bigger size difference than the one I used for the stripes.) That worked fine but, when I cut the little vents, they were a mess of smoothing errors. I spent way too long (around a couple of hours) trying to fix those errors but nothing was working. I tried both vertical and horizontal vents but that didn’t matter, there were still errors. I even crashed trueSpace a few times along the way. Finally, a light bulb clicked on and I realized I should subdivide the nacelle body before the booleans intersect. So, I subdivided them a couple times, did the intersect and the vent cuts and it’s smooth. And to think, if I’d thought of that two hours earlier, I could have saved myself a headache and moved on to another part. Though, now that I finally have that taken care of, it’s time to call it a night.
