I’ve been working on a model of the USS Enterprise, inspired by Eric Reinholt’s exhaustive YouTube tutorial series. It’s shaping up fairly well, but there is a problem I’ve been putting off.
In particular, it’s the engineering hull - the central cylinder which the rest of the ship connects to. Notice how it tapers as it progresses towards the rear.
How can you cut the windows and portholes into this object, without destroying the geometry? I’m trying to do it keeping it all quads. Booleans make the holes but leave a topological mess that appears unfixable. I can’t go down the custom normals route, or autosmooth as this ‘ducks’ the issue.
What makes it more tricky is the fact the cylinder tapers, whereas the orientation of the windows remains horizontal; so the window holes cut across the cylinder’s edges. Trying to move the geo around messes with the shape too much, leading to shading errors. The windows are not placed in a single, simple pattern either.
Is retopo the only solution? I can see that being painful, perhaps even futile in getting round the problem.
Remember, I’m really trying to keep it all quads. Blender Bob’s threats of push-ups for anything otherwise has really got to me. Am I taking this commandment too seriously?
Quads only is for animation - for topology that will deform. There’s nothing wrong with n-gons for hard surface like this, it’s actually quite common. The easier way for sure will be Booleans, even if the topology isn’t perfect
I am kind of coming from the animation camp. The mesh may need to be deformed - for instance when it jumps to warp speed.
If you were to build the ship for animation/VFX, and it had to be all quads, how would you achieve that? They’re making Star Trek movies/tv shows all the time, so it must have been done.
In his tutorial series, Eric used booleans and, I’ve got to admit, it did look fine. However, he hasn’t been using sub-d. That’s when n-gons and booleans can give you nasty surprises.
Believe me, I want to think n-gons and bools are ok to leave in full view on the final model. But I keep hearing that (for animation/VFX) the model must be able to survive subdivision and be capable of deforming - i.e., it must be all quads.
I know flat sufaces are more forgiving. but curved ones are not. And now I’ve found tapering ones are even worse!
Ok gotcha, if you’re looking to deform then quads will be better. This is where things get a bit tricky- there’s no real automatic solution to add holes of indefinite size to an existing mesh while maintaining quad topology. However, some clever use of the knife tool can clean up Boolean topology very quickly, without having to do a full retopo:
I like where you’re coming from, Joseph. Will it work here though? For all the windows? Because of their distribution, it looks like you could hgt lots of poles surrounding the windows, and maybe even joining together to make superpoles (yikes)? It does seem the way to go; but oh, the clean-up!!
How would one go about cleaning up the topology whilst maintaining the tapering, cyllindrical shape of the mesh? And not have to do 100 push-ups if Blender Bob gets to see it? (1 would be bad enough for a man my age.)
