Suggestion for modeling

 From:  Michael Gibson
5839.5 In reply to 5839.3 
Hi mir4ea, so here's an example of how that particular piece could be modeled - you have to start by drawing some profile curves, and then use a construction command like Loft, Sweep, Network, or Extrude to form a broad surface like this (here I'm using sweep through 2 profiles):






Then the next piece would be something like this - here I've drawn 2 curves and used loft to build this adjacent piece:






Now since I have a lofted solid I can cut that into pieces using boolean difference with the sweep as the cutting object. If you have all surfaces and not any solids then instead of boolean difference you would use Edit > Trim - the booleans are oriented around working with solids and automatically forming solid results, Trim works on surfaces and lets you manually pick which cut up pieces to discard. Basically when you're working only with surfaces you should use Trim. But here I used boolean difference to slice the loft by the sweep, and then deleted this piece here:



Then you select the edge and do a fillet to round it off:




Then you just basically repeat this process for every area in your model. But it's going to be an advanced project that will take quite a bit of time to complete because you will have to be doing a lot of 3D swoopy surface construction and that's just fundamentally more difficult to do than only drawing 2D curves. Try to use 2D curves when possible for some parts like here how I've used 2 2D curves for doing the Loft. And again the key thing is to not always try to build each piece directly to its ending border right from the start, if you have some irregular outline those will often need to be formed by an initially larger and more simply constructed sheet and the final outline comes from intersections that trim away the outside of it.

Because you will need to work at a pretty advanced level for a project like this, it may take you a while to get up to speed, you may be better off staying with sculpting for this one where you are already familiar with it. But I hope these examples show you how the general process would work in MoI.

It can take some practice to get used to visualizing how to best construct an extended surface. In some cases you do actually want to build it directly to the final outline, if the outline has some simple structure like bounded by 4 distinct sides. But when the outline is not regular like that you then need to instead visualize an extended area and construct that extended piece instead and cut it.

It tends to be easier for people starting out to understand that an interior hole should come from a cut, but it takes more practice to get used to the outer boundary to be built from cutting as well.

- Michael

EDITED: 19 Apr 2013 by MICHAEL GIBSON