O.k. I have been working on a model of Serenity from Firefly and of course the movie…I’m hoping to write a tut on doing this great ship in Blender. Now I’ve run into a slight problem…take a look at the pic…
…now I have four curves representing the sides of the reactor legs (or horseshoe as I call it). Now I have to surface these so that I get a four sided, smooth object (you get the idea from the background image). I can’t use BevOb because of the four curves thing(unless I’m missing some technique) and converting to mesh results in a mess of vertices’s. Any suggestions on how to model this shape, I’ve tried box modeling it but the result is less than smooth and I can’t use sub surf either. Any advice would be appreciated.
Anyone interested should check out this stellar tutorial with LOADS of reference stuff for Serenity.
Why is it that you cannot use sub surf? Could you provide more screenshots from different angles perhaps? It may be that I am not seeing the problem correctly.
<edit>If you really want to use curves, perhaps you could use just a straight curve as a bevOb of the main profile and then use shrink/fatten tool (alt-s). Example .blend: http://bebraw.googlepages.com/shrinkfatten.blend .</edit>
Here’s what happens when I covert to mesh then face the resulting loops…
Front view:
The problem I’m having, as seen above is the very non-uniform edges, they tend to overlap in some places causing some faces to not join correctly. As for using sub surf (for smoothing) I could if I could get a nice set of parallels, otherwise the Sub causes the mesh to “bundle” around the tri’s that happen when converting this beast to mesh.
Here’s what I wish I could do (I’m pretty sure that Blender doesn’t support this, but I’ve been known to be wrong on occasion) if I could use the curves as a guide to have a “box” primitive, be it a low res curve, or an actual mesh to follow the shape and taper of the curves. Basically using the curves as the edges of the obj. Somehow resulting in a uniform set of faces and vertices, with the same basic shape as the mesh version. Or if there’s a way to skin the the curves without converting to mesh, that would work too.
Hope this helps a bit…
@BeBaw - thanks. I’m trying that now, looks promising…
Here’s what I wish I could do (I’m pretty sure that Blender doesn’t support this, but I’ve been known to be wrong on occasional) if I could use the curves as a guide to have a “box” primitive, be it a low res curve, or an actual mesh to follow the shape and taper of the curves. Somehow resulting in a uniform set of faces and vertices, with the same basic shape as the conversion to mesh.
That sounds a bit like array modifier with curve modifier. Check out http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Array .
That sounds as if it may work, haven’t used this function yet, hell, barely knew what it was for. You know it always takes someone else to point out uses for tools that you never thought.
I was thinking of doing this exact thing. A 3-D model of Serenity. But i was going to start with the interiors first then model the exterior around it. Ultimately I would like to make a walkthrough or fly around with the game engine or vrml that I could pose on line. Let me know what your progress is.
