I’m trying to cobble together the good rocketship Polaris from “Tom Corbett - Space Cadet”.
Now look at the first picture. Note that the walls have a curve.
I want to make a set of long struts that have the form of steel I-beams with a series of holes drilled in them (these are called “lightening holes”). The struts start at the nose and extend to the tail, with a curve that matches perfectly the curve of the wall.
Veteran Blender masters already know that this can easily be done with the power of the Modifier stack.
So first I modeled a tiny strut segment, with an I-beam cross section, and one drilled hole. I made the hole a cylinder with only ten edges, with the interior faces set to “smooth.” This was a pathetic attempt to reduce the polygon count of the strut. I suppose it worked, the polygon count was only a million-zillion, instead of a gazillion-million-zillion. But I digress.
I placed the segment at the base of the rocket, and added to the modifier stack an Array, with the Z coord length set to the height of the rocket. (I modeled the rocket so its long axis is the Z axis). Instantly I had my strut. I then applied the modifier to make it real. Editing the strut I used the “remove double” tool to weld the segments into one unit, which removed a ton of extraneous vertices.
Now the hard part, curving the strut to match the wall.
I quickly discovered the Curve modifier. It would bend the strut, provided that I could construct a curve that matched the wall. I wasted half an hour trying to do this manually, ending up with a tangled mess.
Then the thought occured to me that Blender might have a way to turn a string of edges into a curve. Sure enough, there was a Python script. And it was even one that came with the base Blender install.
I selected a string of edges in the wall, ran the script, got the curve, gave it a descriptive name, selected the strut, applied a Curve modifier to the stack, and linked it to the curve. Success!
Well, the lower edge of the strut was bent funny, but I just trimmed it.
I moved the strut into place, then did a spin-dup to make the other struts. You can see the results in the second image.
I’m sure glad Blender had the proper tools, this would have been a nightmare to do manually.
Attachments
