sci-fi paneling

ScottJ

in almost all sci-fi space ships or station they use random paneling on the hull to create a sense of scale and add detail to what would be a very plain and simple object.

they do this in many game and films, take a look at the below for examples






my question is how people go about getting this effect, it looks random and somewhat auto-generated I have attempted in the past to create a high density mesh, then create "islands" for panels and make a small gap between them.

the problem with this is its time consuming, makes modeling more difficult and higher poly counts (not much of an issue mind) and some times it doesn't look any good.

Sean VanGorder

The easiest way to model that stuff, at least for me, is to model an area with a plane, cut in the panel shapes, detach them from each other, and add a shell modifier. Then when you add the turbosmooth you'll get that bevel, which you can control the tightness of by adding segments via the shell modifier.

Of course, it would also be much easier to add in details like that with a program like nDo or something. Drawing those shapes is super simple in photoshop.

ScottJ

yea, sorry forgot to mention that it doesn't particularly matter if it was photoshop or modeled, thanks for the imput, the shell modifier is similar to what I was doing before, was just wondering if there was a better way.

also any tips or help on how to design the panels, say in photoshop, I find it hard to create and be happy with random stuff as it either looks crap or wrong, the whole idea of these panels is that they are not perfect, edge lines often follow around sharp edges where you may expect that panel to end.

I suppose I find it hard as I am always trying to make things perfect or realistic.

Michael Knubben

This is called 'greeble', and there are even plugins for Max (and other software) that do this automatically.

Ace-Angel

Almost everything you see is tiled. They make several variations of a texture (in something like nDO) and proceed to tile different parts with different things.

They then create a separate texture for lights, etc and tile those as well, on a very simple, flattened, straightened UV.

The Star-Trek ship is the perfect example of this, if you look closely, there are several places where the texture bends harshly, that's because they unwrapped the model in an almost uniform straightened fashion, plus the repeats and decals are a dead give away to this.

From what you have written, it looks like you're trying to model the whole thing? Don't, no one ever does, they all cheat.

Also, an image of what you're having problem with might help. You could be gimping out on Gloss and Specular textures, which entirely define a material. Or maybe the Normals don't have enough bevel to read out the detail nicely. So yeah, show us what you're having problems with.

ScottJ

thanks for the feedback, I noticed the unwrap on the star trek model, my main problem, that I dont have an example of (havnt looked into this for some time but starting to again now) is that the shapes looked odd or too uniform, the eve screenshots are a good example, they have alot of varied shapes and sizes along with depth, yet its not an overly noisy texture, easy to read and works well.