Advice on how to model the shapes of the wall lights on the Death Star?

Support Modeling
#1

I’m fairly new to blender and I’m trying to model a Death Star interior. The elongated vertical lights on the walls are really stumping me as to how I should model them. https://imgur.com/PkgRnkG

I’ve tried using booleans but I’m struggling to model the exact curve I want on the ends. I’ve also tried modeling them out using loop cuts but the ends are angular and I haven’t been able to find a good way to curve them.

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Any advice on what a good way to go about modeling and aligning those in that pattern would be? Thanks in advance.

#2

I would cut them as rectangles and then select all the corner vertices and bevel them. (vertex option)

#3

Thanks for the response! So I went ahead and tried that, and I had some similar problems to when I did the boolean. The curves seem to pull down really far, and going shorter leaves the top flat.

Imgur

Any way around that? I’ve reached out to the guy I saw on reddit who did the DS interior in blender to see how he did it but no response yet.

#4

If you scaled the plane in object mode apply the scale before editing.

#5

Even though you shouldn’t rely on Subdivision Surface to build your shapes, sometimes it’s just so convenient. Use it, to its advantage:

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The “Minimum” is your basic shape, which looks like what you have already, except the topology is already set up for Subd.
“Support” is extra edges to prevent Subd from squashing the shapes too much.
“Even” is, well, even, for best results. You can also bend these (as it seems that what you’d want to do on those pillars in the movie screengrab), without getting pinching problems (too much, that is).

#6

Thank you that seems to work!

#7

Hey thanks for the detailed answer, I wasn’t able to get subdividing to work very well but you explained the approach really well, I’ll look into it again.

#8

Yes you have to be careful not to scale primitives before you edit it can mess up many things, like bevel, and a few modifiers.

#9

Thanks for the heads up!