[Raptor]

Is there a way to get faces of a single primative to meld?

Ie, you have a main hull, with a secondary section attacthed by a pair of struts (Ala bridge region of Hades)

Is there a way to get the two struts to meld together, so that you can form the secondary hull in one piece, without using booleans, or a split section?

This is with TS 3.2.

[TopAce]

Try object union. But SAVE BEFORE DOING THAT AND UNGLUE ALL TURRETS AND LIGHTS ATTACHED TO THE MODEL! Your triangulation will be removed, and you will have to do the triangulation again. This is I am always using.

[Raptor]

Object Union works with two bodies.

I'm talking about working with a single body.

The struts have been extruded from the hull, now I wish for them to merge together, creating a 'Hole' though the ship.

I have also heard that Boolan operations (such as Object Union) really screws ship models up, so I'm tring not to use them.

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Raptor
Object Union works with two bodies.

I have also heard that Boolan operations (such as Object Union) really screws ship models up, so I'm tring not to use them.

You could alway try cutting the ship in half with a boolean and then sticking it back together again
Sometimes booleans screw you up and sometimes they don't. You won't know until you try

As for what you're trying to do without booleans I don't know. I had the same problem with one of my ships at one point. In the end I mearly left the end of the extrusion 0.001m away from the surface of the other face and hoped no one noticed

[KARMA]

you can always create manually new edges to connect faces/create new faces
for example you can cut the connecting structs you were talking about, and connect manually the secondary section to main hull.
If you want to make an hole in an extrusion, you can for example select the face where there will be the hole, extrude with 0,0,0, scale proportionally the extruded face, extrude again with with a negative Z, connect vertices manually to the other side, use erase faces tool to open the hole... but there really are many other strategies.
and booleans don't necessary screw your model, with some experience you should be able to anticipate many probs, but surely you will have always to spend some time to clean double verts and weld unuseful ones, that are the two kind of probs you have with booleans...using boolenas just mean to know how to avoid/correct them..i hated boolys too in past, but now i can use them pretty well

[Raptor]

Well, I'm still a newbie at using TS, so I haven't a clue about splitting the model.

So I have done two things:

1) created the ship with the 'hole' filled in, recessed.

2)once the above was finished, used a Boolan subtraction to create a new 'hole' and saved the result in a diffrent file.

Comparsion:
http://www.angelfire.com/space2/raptorsnest/saturnneck.html

Personally, I much prefer Version A, the one with the gap between the struts.  If it proves to be messed up though...

Comments/suggestions people?  I'll post a link to a set of full pictures once I know which version to use..

And yes, this is THE GTD Saturn design I was muttering about in Sigma's thread.

[karajorma]

Version A

[Sigma]

It seems that your GTD Saturn looks much better than mine!:)
Could you perhaps post a pic of the complete ship?

[Raptor]

Ask and Ye shall Recive!

Compositing right now.....

If the admins don't mind, I'll start a new thread for this....


EDIT: or, alternately, If the admins could rename this thread ( Raptor's GTD Saturn ) Then I'll post here.....

[Raptor]

Here it is, In early TS form (ie, no turrets, no LODs, no textures),

Raptor's GTD Saturn Class Destroyer

http://www.angelfire.com/space2/raptorsnest/GTDSaturn.html

The design is pretty well fixed, but I'm still open to suggestions (particuly around the keel area, I feel that something's missing, but I haven't a clue what......)