Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2010/04/30/recalculating-normals-marking-seams-evening-teselation-turning-tris-to-quads-etc-on-my-spaceship-model-with-blender/

The ugly black hole made by flipped normals

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Screenshot.png

Instead of posting about it i should probably be getting on with it, but what I’m doing is painstakingly – and over a period of days – tidying up my spaceship mesh in Blender.

This spaceship is intended to eventually be the Franklin, a unit used in the Vega Strike, open source space trading, combat and exploration game. I’m following a lot of advice I’ve been getting at the Vega Strike forums and step by step bringing this model to the point it needs to be to be added in game as a unit.

Lots of detail, this might take some time

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/17_franklin_render_back2.jpeg

All this detail in the image here needs to be sharpened as explained in this Vega Strike forums post written by Chuck Starchaser. I’m beginning to wish I had added these seams before duplicating four guns for the wing hard points and attaching them. Oh well.

Hard to forget which edges are done

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Screenshot_wing_edge.png

Once the edge is marked as a seam and sharp it glows a bright radioactive orange in the default Blender theme. I was worried that I would forget which seams were marked. it turns out that i was worrying over nothing.

A tricky bit

It’s not all plain sailing though. There are quite a few tricky seams to mark, like this one which is a circle with a bit hollowed out of it. it’s hidden away under the spaceship’s wing and buried underneath a pipe. I’m not sure how often it’ll even be noticed in the game, but I guess if a thing is worth doing then it’s worth doing right.

Once my mesh was looking a bit better I added the subsur fmodifyer as suggested, but it tore a bit of a hole in the nose of my spaceship model.

Now why on earth did it do that?

smooth

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/franklin_render_action_with_subsurf1.jpeg

I moved some edges of the mesh around and managed to get rid of most of the holes. So here are the latest renders.

the spaceship nose is all mended

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/franklin_render_action_with_subsurf2.jpeg

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/franklin_render_back_with_subsurf2.jpeg

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/franklin_render_side_with_subsurf2.jpeg

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/franklin_render_top_with_subsurf2.jpeg

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/franklin_render_under_with_subsurf2.jpeg

It’s interesting seeing this spaceship model evolve step by step through the various 3D Blender processes toward completion, isn’t it? Hopefully you’ll be able to follow the progress all the way to it’s eventual appearance in the game.

Here’s the blend file. it’s getting quite big with all these quads (and some tris still).

http://www.starbrightillustrations.com/blends/franklin_wip10.blend