Aircraft Panels: to model, or to map?

AverageAce

Hey guys,

I am a HUGE fighter jet fanboy so, naturally, I've decided to model a fighter jet for my next project. Before I get started, however, I like to think about how I'm going to approach the modelling process. In this case, I've hit a road block. I am familiar with modelling cars and have done quite a few of those. When I model cars, I model each individual panel seperately. For those of you who have ever seen an aircraft of any kind, you know that they have TONS of panels. The block I've hit, having never modelled an aircraft, is do I panel model this jet or just box model it and add the panelling as a map? Or should I add it with ZBrush? Any tips about jet modelling are much appreciated! I've tried modeling jets before but never successfully. I plan to stick with this one until it's finished. Any advice on jet modelling will help so much! Thanks!

Ace

passerby

really for panel seams, i would just use ndo2, you will save a lot of time using this to add small detials to your normals

AverageAce

Sweet! Thanks! Box-modelling it is, I guess.

Racer445

something i did once was take the blueprints (which had all the lines on it) of the aircraft and bake them down to my low poly using separate UV channels. the blueprints needed to be cleaned up before and after i baked it, but the result was decent and it saved me a lot of hassle. once it was done i just added rivets using a custom brush and that was that.

AverageAce

Thanks for the reply, Racer! I'm not sure that I follow, though :P Any chance you can walk me through the process?

Amsterdam Hilton Hotel

the main downside of trying to generate the normals from a heightmap (xnormal, ndo, whatever you use) later on is that you'll have to make sure there's almost no distortion in your UVs, which can be a pain with aircraft as they are always composed of compound curves and constantly changing widths. it's also all thrown away and must be redone if you ever have to change the UVs and rebake, although maybe that's not a consideration for you if it's a personal project.

racer's method would help get around those problems so it might be a good one if you have some nice high-res blueprints with panels indicated. you just make a secondary UV channel that corresponds to the blueprints and then bake the blueprints from that secondary UV channel to your primary unwrap.

usually I don't have blueprints like that so what i'll do is model the primary/secondary shape of the vehicle as one simple mesh, subdivide it to achieve the necessary smoothness, cut and extract panels out of that mesh, and then shell/extrude them for depth.

AlecMoody

Since this is a learning project and not under a specific deadline I think you should model them. Don't just draw them in with zbrush but learn to model clean panels that don't necessarily run along your ideal topology. Depending on the shape of the panel gaps and the underlying topology this can be challenging.

Nosslak

I've always had problems making panels for my hard-surface models but lately I've started drawing on the meshes surface directly (Grease Pencil in Blender) to outline the panels and then extract these panels by cutting them out from the original surface with the knife tool. This workflow makes it a lot easier to plan out the panels than just extracting them freehand on the fly IMO. IIRC Maya implemented a tool similar to Blenders Grease Pencil in a recent release as well (haven't used it so I could be wrong), don't know about Max or the others.