Modified TOS Enterprise

Originally posted by thomas7g
I figured that you will probably hit about 200,000 to 400,000 facets with your completed mesh. i did a quick subtraction of the saucer and nacelles, subtracted 20,000 for the shuttle bay, and another 10,000 for details....and well...I probably should have gone alot lower! LOL

Actually, my goal is to keep it under 100,000 faces for the entire mesh. My USS Constitution mesh was less than 50,000, so I think it's do-able, even at a slightly higher mesh density.

Originally posted by thomas7g
Are you using picks of the Muraecki(sp?) renovation of the E?

Among others, yes.

I'm sortof wondering if the way he placed the array jutting forward was his idea or part of the original model. He seems to have made "original" choices with his renovation. And I don't see those strips aligned like that in any pictures pre his renovation.

Originally posted by thomas7g
I'm sortof wondering if the way he placed the array jutting forward was his idea or part of the original model.

Not sure. I was under the impression that those strips were original, especially since one of them is broken off at the tip. I have yet to find a pre-renovation reference photo that shows that area in enough detail to tell for sure.

I for one think that is as sweet as could be....and please OH please post more images concerning how you do the tail and shuttlebay as you did with the above images.......Looks great

and thanks for the file....I will put it to use on the K'T'Inga REDUX to see how it looks

could you explain your typical light setup for the above images?...for the youngins that be new?....

Originally posted by Vektor


Not sure. I was under the impression that those strips were original, especially since one of them is broken off at the tip. I have yet to find a pre-renovation reference photo that shows that area in enough detail to tell for sure.

I went into my archive of old internet downloads and found this one. Its pre-Muraeki when the model had the "turkey-red" powerballs (God that sounds bad).



So what do ya think?

Originally posted by thomas7g
So what do ya think?

It looks like they probably all extended past the front edge of the box but only the bottom strip is still intact. Ironically, it's just the reverse on the post-renovation image I did my modeling from: http://www.mjtsc.pwp.blueyonder.co.u...es/image80.jpg

My best guess is that Muraeki got it right.

Originally posted by jingram_98
What happened to the meshsmooth idea? Where can I fing out more about "the old zero-height extrusion/inward bevel trick"?

Meshsmooth is probably a wonderful thing for more organic modeling, but for this project it was simply overkill. It game me the nice smooth edges and curves that I wanted but it also gave me massive numbers of unnecessary polys. The technique I'm using now relies entirely upon the use of precise geometry to wrangle the smooth shader into doing what I want it to do. The entire mesh as you see it in the above images was created with only a single smoothing group.

As for the "zero-height extrusion/inward bevel trick," let's see if I can offer a VERY simple tutorial. The following steps are specific to Max but should be adaptable to other packages:

1. Create a box 50x50x50.

2. Apply a Mesh Edit modifier.

3. Using polygon selection mode, select two opposite sides of the box.

4. Run the Extrude spinner up a notch or two and then back down to zero. This creates the extra connecting faces you would get with a normal extrusion except you can't see them because they're basically one-dimensional.

5. Enter a value of -1 in the Bevel field and hit ENTER. What you've just done is shrink the originally selected faces by one unit on all sides. The connecting faces created by the Extrude operation can now be seen surrounding the selected faces like a picture frame. The key is that they are co-planar with the selected faces, which is very important in terms of the smooth shader. More on that later.

6. Select two other opposite sides and repeat steps 4 and 5.

7. Select the last two opposite sides and repeat 4 and 5 one more time. It's important to select non-contiguous faces in each case because otherwise the common edges won't extrude and bevel.

8. You now have a box with triple-edged edges. If you apply a Smooth modifier to it and click Smoothing Group 1, the smooth shader will attempt to smooth every surface of the box. The key is that it only smooths between faces that lie at an angle to each other. An edge between two co-planar faces will effectively bring the smooth shader to a halt.

Why is this important? Well, try smoothing the box without all the extruding and beveling, see what happens. The triple edges basically confine the smooth shading. Within the two outer edges, it looks nicely rounded off, and the closer together you make the edges the sharper it will appear.

This works great for blunting those artificially sharp edges you often get with CGI. You have to be careful, though; the farther apart the edges are, the more likely the shading will look artificial. If you want a large, rounded edge, model it that way, otherwise a couple of extruded/beveled edges should do the trick.

Originally posted by thomas7g
btw- is camphering a modifier in your version of max? I have that option in the creation of pimitive, and in some modifiers like bevel, but I don't have it alone as a modifier. If it is a modifier, I really think that its a good idea. And wish I had it.

The chamfering I'm talking about is a spinner control in the Edge Selection Mode of the Mesh Edit modifier. Basically, if you select some edges and enter a value in the chamfer box, it chamfers those edges. Use it with care, though, because the results can be pretty wild with complex selections. I also find it's generally not a good idea to try to create chamfers that are smaller than about 1/10 of whatever base unit you're using.

OHMYGOD!

I wanna kill myself. I never noticed that. mostly cause the CAMFER button turns to BEVEL when you are in facet mod. God. That could have saved me hundred of manhours if I knew that before.

I hand beveled every curved edge on myany models including the secondary hulls edges. moved every single point by hand and using the numerical postion rollout. Six different bulds of that hull! God that was a pain!

[Chris B]

trust me tom, you can do almost more wrong with edge-cahmfering than good.

i made the experience that most of the time stuff get's ****ed up. you end up with a mess of faces sticking out in all directions...

Oh, you definitely have to be careful with edge chamfering, but if you understand how it works then you can avoid most of the pitfalls and achieve some very satisfying results.

There are two main things you need to watch out for when edge chamfering:

1. Avoid situations where chamfering will create new edges that self-intersect.

2. Avoid chamfer values that are smaller than 1/10 of your base unit. Also avoid chamfering any edges that are shorter than 1/10 of your base unit.

For some reason, certain operations in Max, like edge chamfering, booleans and so forth, don't work very well below that threshold. If you're trying to creat details that are smaller than that, you should probably switch to a smaller base unit.

For example, I started on this model using meters as my base unit, but some of the details were down into the centimeter range (0.01 meters). What I discovered is that details that small tend to collapse or get badly distorted when you use booleans and similar types of operations that create new geometry automatically. So I simply scaled everything up by a factor of ten and started using decimeters (0.1 meters) as my base unit. That lets me get down into the centimeter range using only one decimal place. It also makes view navigation a lot easier when you need to get in close to those fine details.

This is the closest thing to a closeup of the deflector area I've seen of the original model from the 60s...
Deflector area

From what my eyes are telling me, it looks like those little strips do indeed extend slightly beyond the end of the boxes. Notice the shadow being cast on the deflector cowling.

So, in light of that, I built my model to reflect what I'm seeing here. But I think this is probably one of those many conjectural details that we all may never completely agree upon.

I don't suppose you can just change your base unit? I tried doing a operation until I got errors. Then I enlarged the mesh and it worked fine, then shrunk it down. Weird error. But it looks like there may be some workarounds.

Oh and thank you guys for all your advice on this. I really appreciate you teaching me about this. I coulda swore this feature was not available.

Originally posted by thomas7g
I don't suppose you can just change your base unit? I tried doing a operation until I got errors. Then I enlarged the mesh and it worked fine, then shrunk it down. Weird error. But it looks like there may be some workarounds.

Well, the base unit is usually arbitrary. You can call it whatever you want. The key is to look at the smallest detail you plan to build and then choose a base unit that is no more than 10 times that size.

Max does a fine job of storing and representing geometry out to several decimal places, but certain types of operations don't seem to use enough precision to deal with such fine details accurately. For example, if you cut a boolean across two edges that are less than 1/20 of a unit a part, more than likely the ends of those edges will collapse into a single vertex. Edge chamfering can cause similar problems.

Personally, I tend to stick with powers of ten because most of the stuff I've been building uses metric dimensions anyway. If I find myself working on geometry smaller than 1/10 of my base unit, I just scale everything up by a factor of 10 and keep going.

DAMN AMAZING!!! In your last pics of the secondary hull it almost looks like a cool retro flash light. LOL!!

Creating the hangar deck cutout and cove:

1. Detach back half of secondary hull to isolate any problems that may occur.


2. Bring in spline created from Sinclair drawings and extrude.


3. Boolean subtraction.


4. Extrude faces where fantail will be. This is obviously the wrong shape but it will serve its purpose later.


5. Bring in spline created from Sinclair drawings and extrude.


6. Boolean subtraction.


Now, the end result of all this is not very pretty. In fact, for some reason, about 1/3 of the faces around the cylinder just disappeared on me after I saved and reopened the file, but reconstructing them is relatively easy. A little vertex welding here and there and it should come out smooth as a baby's butt.

No more time for that tonight, though. Probably tomorrow.

Crazy me, I always though boolean modelling was dead. Hah!

Originally posted by mercutiojb
Crazy me, I always though boolean modelling was dead. Hah!

You wouldn't say that if you used POV-Ray for any length of time... it's probably one of the more common modeling operations used.

Heh, povray was what got me into 3D modelling! Nothing like spending all day downloading it from a BBS, just to have it render all night on my 486 SX/25mhz. Those were the days! I was just a young teen then

Well, as often happens on a project like this, I've realized that I could have made things easier on myself by performing these modeling operations in a different order. I'm going to go back and redo the aft end of the sec hull from scratch with an additional bit of modeling added in before the booleans. Specifically, I'm going to create the hangar deck cavity first, then do the cutouts for the hood over the fantail and the cove beneath. That's the simplest way I can think of to get the shape of the edge of that hood to come out right.

Creating the basic structure back there should be very simple using a combination of booleans very similar to what I've already demonstrated. Rounding off the edges should also be relatively easy. The hard part will be eliminating all the long, skiny triangles that result from the boolean operations and tend to play havoc with the smooth shader, but I think I've already got a fairly simple strategy in mind for that as well.

Stay tuned.

How do you round the edges, exactly, after a boolean? It seems like everyone knows the "secret" but me...

Originally posted by mercutiojb
How do you round the edges, exactly, after a boolean? It seems like everyone knows the "secret" but me...

The simplest way is to chamfer the edges in question, but it must be done carefully to avoid mesh errors. A more complex and realistic method is to use multiple chamfers to actually round the edge off, or to cut additional edges into the adjacent surfaces as smoothing stops and let the smooth shader simulate a rounded edge. The exact methods are difficult to describe and heavily dependant on the application.

er... why did you use a square and not a half cylinder for the base of your hanger lip?

Hehe, well, I meant in MAX specifically, but I'll give it a go.

Originally posted by thomas7g
er... why did you use a square and not a half cylinder for the base of your hanger lip?

If you're talking about the fantail, the square box was left over after an extrusion and the boolean subtraction of the cove. I did it that way because the cove never quite flattens out on the bottom of the fantail, there's still a tiny bit of slope and curvature there. My intention had been to use a boolean intersection between the fantail box and a cylinder to achieve the final shape, retaining that perfect underside curvature in the process. However, since I'm chucking everything and starting over on the aft end, I may just do it a little differently next time.

if you use a cylinder whose bottom extends lower than the fantail, then you can boolean the cylinder.

I use boolean subtraction a lot. Spend a lot of time welding points and cleaning up extra polygons, too.

No time for commentaries tonight, but I updated the last six images and here are three new ones, all showing the new sequence of operations I decided to use to model the aft end of the secondary hull:





Once again, the previous six images have been updated so go back and check 'em out.