I have to model this for my midterm assignment. Whats a good way to go about modeling a ship's hull? I have tried and all my attempts look to blocky and flat.
If just the shape, you could literally start with a sphere, squash and stretch it till you block out the main shape, delete 3/4th of it and you now have a workable mass you could push and pull verts as needed. FFD modifiers are your friend.
If you went the planks route, you could do a couple methods. Either model all the planks out completely flat for the basic size of it then FFD the hell out of the group, or even take the above spherical advice with enough tesselation and use extrude / bevels once you have the clean topology. Would probably still require some manual labor (read - vert pushing) though.
Here's what I mean in pictures. About 30 seconds of modeling time to block the shape in. Use symmetry to mirror to the other side and massage the verts as needed.
If you want to model the planks you could make a basemesh of the hull unwrap it, use sliteknit or textools UVW Swap + Morpher lay out planks on the unwrapped mesh and morph it back.
Here is an very quick example:
You could use the basemesh as it is to paint on it to i think.
This was made out of a box and brought into shape in about 2 minutes, so nothing really fancy there
I have tex tools but I am not understanding the process that you explained. How do I lay out the planks from the uvw's and what do I do with the morpher?
First thing to do is unwrap your mesh in a way that you can easily lay out your planks.
Then use slideknit on your basemesh with a UV Scale value, so that it´s almost the same size(the resulting mesh will not be the same size, so play around with the value so that it´s almost the same, otherwise there could be some stretching )
I used 200% in this example, which worked quite good, just try out till you are satisfied
You will get a second mesh with a morpher modfier(and it looks like the UVW´s we layed out hurray!)
The section i marked in blue can be used to morph between the flat version and your original basemesh, just use a value of 0 or 100, not to hard to use.
Now it´s time to lay out our planks, for example like that:
Afterwards attach all planks together, so that they are one object and add a skin wrap modifier to it and add the mesh which has the morph modifier to it.
After that you can select the Object with the morpher modifier and change the morph value to 100 and the planks should deform accordingly.
I would recommend to use Slideknit tools, because it´s far easier with it.
I was following this example but used Textools to create a uvwflat mesh, however when I apply a morpher modifer to the flat second mesh it wont let me select the cylinder as the target, not sure what I've done wrong.
I think its something to do with vertex order/count, I deleted a face and tried again and got this: http://imgur.com/X0Sfj.png
Anyone got a copy of slidknot which works with 2011?
No problem thanks for the help! Plan on sculpting a few planks in brush then laying them out with the work flow you just described. Should work pretty good.
Yah I found that out earlier lol. Oh and just in case anyone else wants to try this out, when you use skin wrap make sure you have the blend to base unchecked and weight all points checked.
Replies
A lot of things are repeating in that picture so you can make 2 or 3 instances of an object and clone it around.
If you went the planks route, you could do a couple methods. Either model all the planks out completely flat for the basic size of it then FFD the hell out of the group, or even take the above spherical advice with enough tesselation and use extrude / bevels once you have the clean topology. Would probably still require some manual labor (read - vert pushing) though.
Here is an very quick example:
You could use the basemesh as it is to paint on it to i think.
This was made out of a box and brought into shape in about 2 minutes, so nothing really fancy there
Edit: Here it goes:
First thing to do is unwrap your mesh in a way that you can easily lay out your planks.
Then use slideknit on your basemesh with a UV Scale value, so that it´s almost the same size(the resulting mesh will not be the same size, so play around with the value so that it´s almost the same, otherwise there could be some stretching )
I used 200% in this example, which worked quite good, just try out till you are satisfied
You will get a second mesh with a morpher modfier(and it looks like the UVW´s we layed out hurray!)
The section i marked in blue can be used to morph between the flat version and your original basemesh, just use a value of 0 or 100, not to hard to use.
Now it´s time to lay out our planks, for example like that:
Afterwards attach all planks together, so that they are one object and add a skin wrap modifier to it and add the mesh which has the morph modifier to it.
After that you can select the Object with the morpher modifier and change the morph value to 100 and the planks should deform accordingly.
I would recommend to use Slideknit tools, because it´s far easier with it.
Hope that helps!:poly124:
I think its something to do with vertex order/count, I deleted a face and tried again and got this:
http://imgur.com/X0Sfj.png
Anyone got a copy of slidknot which works with 2011?
Success!