Yes on both accounts. I don't have a version that shows the lines, but in essense I took a shape that was a trapezoid with rounded corners (if you're looking at it from the front side) and swept it around two rails with a third scaling rail as well to help get the shape right.

Yes, I did a projection of a straight line onto the hull, which is the yellow rail I highlighted on the second drawing which was where my problems started.

Would it be best to start over in V2 and recreate my hull shape - would that even fix my problem?

Hi Ryan, yeah the sweep in v2 does solve that problem and shouldn't get that kind of twisting effect in it.

It probably is a good idea to recreate the body and get it to be kind of cleaner to start with, usually if there are problems with big pieces early on it will trickle down and cause additional problems when more stuff is derived from it.

But also I've attached an new version here with just that rail curve redrawn - I did by drawing in 3 line segments, then using Blend to put in the connecting pieces (blend will guarantee a smooth piece) and then mirroring that.

If you try sweeping with this version you should get the result you were looking for I think.

- Michael

Hi Ryan, one other note though - you are going along with the right general idea here, to build the thing as a larger piece like this:



and then to slice off the ends, rather than trying to draw the sliced off end first and then try to create surfaces from that.

So you're definitely going in the right direction, but in this case your starting surfaces didn't end up too good, partly because of a problem in sweep in v1 but I'm also not sure if you might have had a little wiggly area in some of your starting curves.

If you are going to give redrawing the thing a try, you might want to post your initial curves here so I can take a look and maybe give some advice on that initial shaping.

- Michael

Yep, I tried sweeping the trapezoid shape around the rail, worked like a charm now.

Thanks Michael, appreciate the help.

Ryan.

Argh, too late!

Here's a trick I learned while making a Vaygr BC. (time is brief, daughter in tub, pictures later if possible)

Do a side view
Draw a set of panels lines
Use the lines to cut into the ship (boolean diff)
Do a one dimensional scale of the panel line chunk to shrink it into the middle of the ship
Use boolean union to join the main part and shrunk panel line section back together.

Nope, you're not too late! I'm still having problems - so I decided to reboot the project and start with rebuilding the hull in the v2 software.

Per Michael's request, here is my initial shape and three rails. Rails 1 and 2 are what I use for the sweep, rail 3 is scaling rail I'm using to widen the sweep a bit.



My next step will be to make some cuts using boolean dif commands to get back to the shape I had in version 1.

Then I'll give some panel lines a go. Otterman, would still love to see some detail shots of how you get yours to come out so good!

Ryan.

Otterman,

So I think I follow how you're doing it. I tried a slightly different way which seems to be working. Because I have a very odd shaped hull, I made a copy of the hull and reduced it by 10% and placed it inside the other hull (aligning the best I could by eye to put it right in the middle of the other hull in all three directions). Then I did what you recommend, I created some panel lining, did a boolean dif and then cut out the lines from the outer hull, leaving the inner hull uncut and helping to form the channel.

Seems to be working OK, I'm going to try a few more lines and see how it continues to work.

Thanks for the insight, really appreciate it.

Ryan.

OK - after an afternoon of work, I've got the front of the hull pretty much banged out. I used a variation of what Otterman had recommended, and I think it came out pretty good. Since I've never actually 3D printed something, I'm not sure if my panel lines are deep enough/too deep.

Here's how it is shaping up.



So far, so good.

Ryan.

Hi Ryan,

> Per Michael's request, here is my initial shape and three rails. Rails 1 and
> 2 are what I use for the sweep, rail 3 is scaling rail I'm using to widen the
> sweep a bit.

Thanks for posting those - yeah in v2 the sweep result is looking a whole lot better in its internal surface structure.

In the v2 sweep, if you turn on surface control points (for solids you usually need to use Edit/Separate first to break it into individual surfaces before points will turn on), you get this kind of result:




That's a lot better than the previous one that you did in v1 that had a lot of shearing and slanting in it.

So that's good to know that the sweep update in v2 is helping for that problem.


It looks like you have made some great progress!

One possible other general tip - you may want to focus on building something like this as 1/2 only and then mirror it at the end to produce the other half instead of working on both sides during the regular modeling.

- Michael

Ryan,

Regarding the depth of your panel lines, I think that they seem rather deep indeed, which might be OK on the hull itself to give the effect of cladding or armor often seen on Sci-Fi spaceships, but for panels, most should not be recessed at all. You might want to delineate the panels with a double contour and have that narrow band recessed instead, leaving the panel itself flush with the hull. Unless the effect you want is more like an open bay.

Jean-Paul