Hello all!
I’m sure this has been done a dozen times before, but something the other day reminded me of the show and I just had to try it. So far I mocked up the basic form from as many angles as I could find and plan to start refining and cleaning up the mesh (I wasn’t going to show the wire frame until it’s more respectable). The trouble I had was most of the sources I could find were toys and models, and they seem to differ a fair bit in detail and proportion. So right now I know there are a number of places to work on, but please point anything out as I may overlook something as I go.
I plan to make all the docking bays, missile rack, intake vanes etc. functional, and hopefully even make models of the G1 to G4 vehicles to fit into it. But after many hours watching old episodes (most of that time spent waiting for videos to download), I still can’t remember how the nose section opened for the car! Does anyone know? Did it split in half and recede into the main body, or did it do something else?
So once again the ability to make a nice shape with a low face count has eluded me. It’s a bit hard to see some of it I know, but with 1 subsurf level, it hit nearly 18,000 faces. I was hoping for a lot less, as there are still a lot of details to add.
Am I just trying too hard to eliminate non-quads and have good loops?
Should I be making the round surfaces (like the wing pods and the top part of the ship) separate objects to avoid trying to stitch them together with dozens of extra edge loops?
It is high-poly because you are not trusting the Subsurf to do its job.
Take the horizontal loops on the nose cone. You could do with two it three. I cannot see other parts fully, but I would bet you could x,l dozens if Edge Loops.
Have you noticed what happens to a Cube when it has Suburf of level 2 or so? It almost makes a perfect sphere. Now see if you can apply this principal to every curved surface on your mesh.
Thanks, I’m going to try it again over the weekend and somehow force myself not not to make an edge for every contour. With that said, in a mehanical/stiff model like this, is it better to just allow triangles wherever needed and ease up on the desire for proper loops?
I found that most of the loops I added were in order to join different surfaces - like the round, curved sections more angular tapered arease - while trying to get as many quads as I could.
So after 10 or so tries, I finally got the ship down to about 6000 faces after 1 subsurf level. Then ran into all kinds of problems trying to get straight lines for hatches and creases without that nasty shading problem that occurs. So I decided to just apply the sub surf and then start cutting holes and refining the shape. Got a little tired of modelling so I started texturing. I think I like the toonish style that came out on the nose cone as opposed to trying to make something photo real. The rest of the ship is just coloured for reference and isn’t actually textured yet.
So I’ve it rigged to the point where I think it’s usable but not remotely professional. I’m not sure about the materials. I thought the toonish look would be appropriate and I kind of wanted to stay to the style of the original show, but maybe it just looks incomplete?
Anyway, I have to shelve this for a while so I thought I’d put up a short turntable video of it for posterity. Might revisit it later at some point, but other projects need attention now. I know the lighting and specularity isn’t up to par, but this was more about making the model itself and trying to learn something about rigging.
If anyone is interested in it, I’ll see about uploading the blend somewhere, but so far, there hasn’t seemed to be. I think it will be half an hour or so before the video is up.
Cheers.
