I modeled a ship and wonder if someone has a possible solution to a problem. I separated the ship into sections for windows. Then I created a window cutout out then put it in a array matching a grid. Then I did a extrude on the windows. After that I Boolean them to a each section.
The problem is I have a slight triangle pile. I used the Blender 2.63 build and also tried the 2.63 which did the Boolean using triangles. Its fine but because of it I can do a clean extrude on a the new section because of the triangles. I figure the newer version would be updated to be able to do NGONS.
I tried the Remesh modifier and that was no help. I was thinking just keep the triangle and treat it as a surface imperfection. Doing otherwise will turn a big vertex mesh to a Titanic sized vertex mesh.
you don’t really have to have mesh windows at all. you can do that with a texture. if you have an earlier one before you added the windows, just UV map it, and bake the texture of the high poly one onto the low poly one. i think that is possible, though admittedly I have never tried that. also, if you make the texture of the high poly one black for the body, and white for the windows, and bake that to an image file, you can use it as an emit map.
I tried that on another model which worked but due to the size of this model. Doing the texture would take forever including aligning everything for model at least for me. This model I’m going really do majority of closeups up to feets from the hull and saucer. So textured windows isn’t a option.
I am just modeling it for now sectioning certain pieces and in the future with another modeling software. I will make more cleaned up windows sections.
That was a option but considering I want the very rounded edges as possible the poly count would be about 16 times times 1,000/windows+ then throw in the a lot of extra vertices to make it to connect to the original mesh. While keeping everything aligned.
I want to have lots of windows all around the structure bottom surface.
Problem is that if i do that with booleans, i’m goint to meet the same problem as you : the lighting will become bad with all those edges.
So to work around this, i’ll make the window being separate models.
I make the window at some distance of the model (hurray for the spin function ) :
Then from the top view, i select all my planes, press G then Enter, and they’re all projected on the model behind it.
Now i disable the retopo projection by returning the button to their default state.
I need to give a little “depth” to those windows to avoid some z fighting problem.
After having all the windows selected, i press E then Enter the extrude but not move anything.
Then i press ALT+S for the shrink/wrap type of extruding i control visually that i don’t extrude too much like this
That should be it, a little render with materials to check i the ALT+S was good enough (if there’s no z-fighting it’s good, else just redo it a bit more)
As said, that’s not the solution, but just a workaround that allow to use lots of windows without impacting in any negative way the light on the main ships body, and additionally save a very lot of faces
Depending on the surface of the main body you want to project the windows on, you may want to subdivide those windows once or twice before.
I opted to go with converting the sections to bmesh ngons. I was able to keep some of the topology. I might be pushing the limits of it but going end up doing that but the results are much cleaner.
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