Hi guys, I’m having a small problem that I can’t seem to find a solution to. I’m modeling a spaceship of sorts and wanted to use a design similar to this, with many panels of bodywork fitting over machinery. I started modeling the exterior of the ship and then planned to cut it into panels, expand the panels from a central point, and fit them over the main body.
I’ve cut my ship into sections (colour coded - each colour represents a seperated mesh object):
Now I’m trying to find a way to expand each mesh away from the center of the model without scaling, similar to an ‘exploded’ view. I hope you can understand what I mean
If anyone has any idea on how I can get this to work I’d really appreciate it, otherwise it looks like I’ll have to move all the meshes away from each other by hand?
That’s because it looks like you have some of your objects on a X axis and scaling with manipulate centers only moves them away from the 3D cursor (which is on X axis too). Those that are not on the X axis gets moved away from the 3D cursor and also away from the objects that are on the X axis.
In my example I had separate parts for each of the sides (I used mirror modifier and applied that before making the example).
Without actually creating animation, you can change the direction of an element’s movement when scaling using origins by changing the location of the origin of that particular element. In your case that would mean moving the origin to a point on the (imaginary!) vector from the center to where you want it to end up, and then doing the steps that JA described.
To move the origin of an object, move the 3d cursor to the location you want to move the origin to, and then from the object transform menu choose origin to 3d cursor. This will almost certainly wreak havoc on any nonUV textures you might have but it looks like you have only basic materials used, so it won’t affect your model.
