What? No, you weren’t being harsh. I’m sorry if I sounded like I thought you were. I was just joking around about the booleans because I knew I could look them up myself. Thanks for pointing those two things out though. That might be very helpful. I have to try it out.
edit: I think this will work. I did find an interesting problem (glitch?), where the “difference” option does what union is supposed to do, and the “union” option does what “difference” is supposed to do.
edit 2: Actually, I’m not sure… the mesh is much messier than I originally thought.
yeah, booleaons (can’t spell) are a little weird. i just usually play with them until they turn out the way i like, so thats what i would do. i like the renders so far, and i can’t wait for the final model. are you planning to rig/animate it.
I haven’t tried rigging or animating before, so I’m not sure if I’m going to animate it. I guess what it will come down to is whether it is animatable once I’m finished, since I don’t know anything about what steps to take to make something animatable.
Here is a newer version with the nose gun and the round thing on the top. I’ve also started a little more work on the leg (which I’ve temporarily rotated so I can work in 90 degree angles).
The nose gun is just a seperate object sitting partially inside the body. The barrels are actually another seperate object sticking partway into the ball of the nose gun.
I’m fairly new to Blender, too but I’ve found like most things there’s a tipping point up to which it’s hard and things take forever and after which things get easier and easier.
Leave the turret ball a separate object from the hull- that will make it much easier to animate when the model is complete. Leave the barrels individual separate objects, too. That way they can slide to show recoil when they fire.
A trick to make animating machines easier is to make each part that moves relative to the others a separate object- that way you can select the individual objects and parent them to bones without having to think about vertex groups.
Such things may be getting the cart before the horse to you, but if you think about doing it that way now it will save you work later when you get around to animating it.
It also makes modeling easier to break a complex mesh into several objects because you have a smaller less confusing cloud of vertices to pick through in edit mode with several smaller objects than you would with one big sea of vertices.
You can always use parents later (or amratures even later) to keep all the parts moving together.
Thanks for the comments and suggestions. Now I don’t feel so bad about making the pieces separate objects.
Right now I’m having some trouble with the leg.
The vertices from the top need to connect with the cylinder and those edges need to be straight. I’ve drawn red lines to show how those edges line up (rather, don’t line up) with any of the vertices on the cylinder. I’m not sure what step I should take to fix this. I tried using the knife tool, but the Exact Knife isn’t helpful because you can’t contrain its movement to the grid or to a particular axis. Also, for the rightmost vertex of the cylinder, you can see the entire cylinder needs to be shifted slightly to the right. I don’t know how I would accomplish this. Blender should have a way to snap an object to the grid based on one end of it…
You are going to have to rotate the round part. And maybe add loop cuts in certain places so you can weld them together. and also a cut in the middle so that you can weld it there…
First of all, this is looking good so far. As to answering your question, I would say make it easy on your self now and later and make them septerate objects. I haven’t done all that much mechanical modeling and animation, but I have done a little, and I can tell you that joints work better if each piece that moves is a seperate object.
Yeah i would have to agree, keep it a seperate part… But if you really want to make it one piece, then this is what I meant. You will have to add edge loops at these lines so as to be able to weld them together. You also might need some cuts in the top view as well.
My personal opinion is that Blender is currently not the ideal program for creating such mechanical models. The main reason is because blender’s boolean system is not very stable and often ends up ruining the mesh instead. If you don’t get what I mean, check out some of the models and WIPs at http://www.scifi-meshes.com (they are really good). Using commercial programs such as 3dsmax, almost every model relies heavily on booleans. Your major worry about creating seperate objects would not be that much of a worry if blender had a better bolean system, it would then be amazingly simple to just join everything together.
You guys are right, it has to be seperate. Currently it is impossible to make an accurate cut, and Booleans are largely worthless as well.
Thanks for the feedback and the link, Blazer. I can’t figure out how to download the Blend files, if it is even possible. From the image of their AT-PT model, it appears they followed the blueprint exactly - which unfortunately means that it is impossible for their model to turn, and the upper-rear leg joint can’t bend. I’ve been reworking the legs slightly so all the joints can actually move and it is physcially possible for the thing to turn.
Icedicicle: I agree, but Blender fits my budget a bit better than more professional programs .
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