[Scooby_Doo]

I agree Admiral, and another thing that can be helpful before you start bevelling and greebling is to reasonably optimize the main hull, it'll make beveling/cutting much easier if you don't have to fix as many vertices after the bevel/cut. I've found it much saner after doing a cut is weld the unnecessary vertices ASP. I also recommend using and trying to keep the modifier stack, especially if your going it edit the mesh shape.  If you make a mistake or don't like the result (happens plenty of times) simply remove the entry in the stack and should fix it. 

Looking at it now, it looks much much smaller with the pilots giving it relative size.

If you want some ideas for details, you can steal some ideas from this, it's basically your model anways     It's always good to have a collection of detail pieces storage away. 

[Vasudan Admiral]

Errm, Scooby.....did you just pinch his design?

And incidentally, almost none of that 3ds type advice really applies to Blender style modeling sorry.
Eg:
- His modifier stack will consist of "mirror" and that's it. Blender operates more through directly and manually manipulating the mesh than 3ds. If you want to change the shape of something, you go in manually and use the tools to do it rather than a modifier stack.

- Beveling and cutting is handled in a completely different way in Blender. Optimising the geometry before or after in the way you describe is unnessecary, because you barely run into that type of problem at all.

- The 'collection of reusable details' system isn't a particularly good way to do things in Blender, simply because it's much easier to make new cooler stuff than it is to find some old stuff that fits and then properly integrate it with the hull. New stuff gives you more modeling practice too, which is most important at this stage.

[Scooby_Doo]

Well I did say it was his... and on the first page too.  (in fact it's named after him) 

Hmmm what happens when you cut a rectangle (with two polys) in half? Do you end up with 4 polys or 6?

Ok I should have added "your own personaly collection", stuff that you've made up earlier (or at least collected) 

[Vasudan Admiral]

I mean why are you detailing it up to release level though?

Anyways, there are a number of ways to do just about any geometry related operation in Blender actually. Remember that it won't automatically triangulate all your mesh the way 3ds will, so you have a couple of options:

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y184/VA--Twisted_Infinities/Misc/BlenderCutTypes.jpg
1) Select the two edges you want to cut in half and press W>"subdivide"
2) Select the rectangle, press K to get the knife tool, click above and below the middle of the rectangle, press enter and it will split it as you specified.
3) Don't even bother making the rectangle in the first place and just make an edge. Duplicate or extrude the edge twice in the same direction.

About the object collections, I know what you mean, but I wouldn't recommend it for the same reasons as before - it's quicker to make new cool stuff that is better taylored to the ship than it is to open up old parts that won't give you much/any modeling practice.

[Scooby_Doo]

Because I was bored, anyways I was never going to finish it so i deleted it 

Ahh I forgot about not triangulation, that would make a world of difference.

[Davin]

Anyways, heres some work done today, I put some details into the engine pods and also fixed some geometry problems in the cockpit. Heres picture!

[Vasudan Admiral]

Nice, and I see you worked out how to make stuff transparent too.
Keep it up.

[Scooby_Doo]

I really like your transparent smooth cockpit 

[Davin]

Umm, just a question. how do you uv map faces (detailing) that arn't directly attached to the hull of the ship.

[Scooby_Doo]

I'll let Admiral explain the details on that one. 

But in Max, theres two ways of handling this, that I know of.  Maybe they can be translated into blender

First:
First the hard way. uvmap the main hull, export the uvmap to a bmp file (not sure what exactly the blender version for texporter is).  Apply that texture to the main hull and details. Then uvmap the details piece by piece, moving the mapping so it doesn't collide with the previous mapped areas (hopefully blender allows you to see the bmp in the uv mapping window)

Second:
The Easy way 
Attach everything into one giant object, no booleaning, welding, just plain-jane attach. You can then see everythings uvmap at once* .  Once everythings to your liking and fitting nice and snug on the map, detach the details. (In max you can select subobjects and detach them, which would select all counted via vertex polys.  Hence no welding or booleaning).




* although I recommend when creating the map, do it piece-meal otherwise it can be kinda overwhelming

[Einstine909]

method "A" for UV map export... screen shot the UV's then use what ever program to crop it...

method "B"...  in the image/UV editor under the UV's menu, scripts, save UV face layout.

[Davin]

Ok maybe I should have been more specific. When UV mapping items that aren't directly attached to the hull via polys the UV mapping console seems to display said items with a singular line instead of a 2 dimensional polygon. At least thats my interpretation of what happens.

[Scooby_Doo]

Theres two things i'm thinking of right off hand...

a near zero area triangle (Max STL calls them spikes),  you should find those triangles and remove them.  They will confuse you when uvmapping, produce possible smoothing problems, and may even cause pcs to lockup.

or just the uvmap looks like a line rather than triangle, then thats a simple uv map editing    (Hopefully its this one)

[Davin]

Theres two things i'm thinking of right off hand...

a near zero area triangle (Max STL calls them spikes),  you should find those triangles and remove them.  They will confuse you when uvmapping, produce possible smoothing problems, and may even cause pcs to lockup.

or just the uvmap looks like a line rather than triangle, then thats a simple uv map editing    (Hopefully its this one)

No, I deleted the old uv map created a new one, this one only had 1 line on it and I found that it was because of 2 faces with texture face settings different than the rest. problem seems to be solved. Gonna map it tomorrow... wait... later this morning I should say.

Edit: Yeah that fixed the problem. I have it 3/4 mapped. Mainly all I need to map it the cockpit and some other small details, although I am dreading mapping the cockpit for some reason... I should have mapping done soon (within a day or 2)

[Davin]

Ok since I've wasted a few days trying to learn a good way of UV mapping without success, could someone point me to a good tutorial for how to map out my ship.

[Vasudan Admiral]

Well, I've found a pair:
http://www.tutorialized.com/tutorial/UV-Mapping-Texturing/5852

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/UV_Map_Basics

If they're not enough, there's a video tutorial here too:
http://blender3d.org/cms/Model_Material_Light.397.0.html

And failing all of that, ask away and I'll do my best to answer.

[Davin]

Ok, I think I've figured UV mapping out. The absence of LSCM had been throwing me off the whole time and a thorough search online found closest thing to it in my version of blender. That being said texturing should be a very... interesting process.

[Scooby_Doo]

Admiral, do you know of any good tutorials for organic shaped models? Not just round or cylinder, none of my techniques really work well 

[Vasudan Admiral]

None in Max's inbuilt tut set? That seemed pretty comprehensive to me.

In Blender I know you could do a very good job with the pinning feature - where you unwrap a mesh, pin the bits you like as they are, unwrap again, pin further, unwrap again until the entire thing has been unfolded to however accurate you want it to be. This results in something like this: http://wiki.blender.org/uploads/a/ae/Manual-UV-Sue-Weld.png

====

You can also use the flat angle unwrap thingie, which results in going from something like this:
http://wiki.blender.org/uploads/thumb/d/d5/Rel242_snurgle.png/642px-Rel242_snurgle.png

to something like this:
http://wiki.blender.org/uploads/thumb/8/82/Rel242_flatsnurgle.png/642px-Rel242_flatsnurgle.png

====

Max will definitely have something along those lines.



Also, Davin; I've found this for Blender UV tutorials: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual
Go down to the "Painting and Modifying your UV Selection" bit. Some very good stuff there.