Modeling: Alex's "Nose Theory" Ship Tutorial

[Alex Drake]

Okay ladies and gents, due to a few inquiries I thought it might be interesting to detail the creation of my latest AFF ship in Maya 5 with a step by step tutorial. This tut is meant to detail my "Nose Theory" approach to ship design.

What is Nose Theory?

Well, technically it is my particular approach to design. It is predicated on the belief that 90% of a ship's profile is understood from the nose first. More clearly, the nose defines the ship. Thus, designing a ship nose-first gives the designer a base from which to expand the rest of the craft (be it large or small). This is by no means a "standard" design convention, just something I tagged myself as I'm self taught.

Step 1: The Base Cube

Usually the hardest thing for a modeller to do is simply begin the project. All sorts of modeling tuts start with a wide variety of NURBs or polys. In this case we'll start by creating a basic cube (with a few tweaks).

http://www.dendezyn.net/aff/pics/tut1.jpg

As you can san see, select the "Create" tab, then choose "Polygon primitives". Instead of selecting a basic cube, click the preferences box next to "Cube".

Make to use subdivs along the width with some number higher than 1. I chose 5 because its just enough subdivs to give us some opening flexibility. Make sure you have some depth subdivs as well, I chose 3 because it allows us to define something of the ship's profile right off the bat. Your window should look like this when you're done:

http://www.dendezyn.net/aff/pics/tut2.jpg

Huzzah! Now you should have a cube that looks like this:

http://www.dendezyn.net/aff/pics/tut3.jpg

Congrats, you've completed step 1.


Step 2: The Nose Profile

Ok, now we've got our basic unit, we're going to have to start expanding it a bit to provide our ship's basic orientation. Generally speaking there are three general design and orientation conventions; Horizontal, Vertical, and Symmetrical. Horizontal ships are wide across the middle, much like the hiigaran craft. Vertical craft are aligned more like wet-navy ships, with deep troughs and more angular prows (Vagyr anyone?). Symetrical ships usually resemble a geometric shape of some sort, and for the most part don't favor one orientation or another (an example are Borg ships, like the cube or sphere).

Since I have a naval bent in mind for this design, I'm going to go with a vertical orientation.

The First thing we need to do now is get us some "breathing room" so we can start editing the various sections of our craft. One easy way to do this is switch your viewing selection to vertices, then select every vert of the cube. Choosing the "Scale" tool, then grab the tab that sits along your z-axis and drag it outwards till your model looks something like this:

http://www.dendezyn.net/aff/pics/tut4.jpg

(Alternatively, you can achieve this by using the move tool and selecting the verts in a particular "collar" and moving them individually, I prefer to do it this way because it lets me decide just how far apart each vert cluster is).

At any rate, we now have the space we need, but we're not quite done with morphing the cube yet. One thing important to remember is that naval ships often have a slightly rounded appearance. Just because our lil' boat is gonna put around in space doesn't mean we can't pay homage to its more terrestrial origins.

Therefore, we're going to take a low poly approach to rounding. Choose the "front" view and select all the verts on the corners of the your model. Then select the scale tool again and use it to scale them "down" till it looks something like this:

http://www.dendezyn.net/aff/pics/tut5.jpg

With that done, we want to start to flesh our model out a bit, to do his we're going to make use of a tool that will become your best friend in the world.

Step 3: Extrusions , A Ship-Builders Best Friend

Start by selecting the polys that run along the outside of your model. The goto the Edit Polygons" tab, and select "Extrude Polygon". Typically its best to to extrude along straight lines, especially if you're operating on symetrical faces. Extrude out the sides of your model so they look something like this:

http://www.dendezyn.net/aff/pics/tut6.jpg

Now you're going to want to drag the "bottom" of your model out so it starts to form a trough. I had fun with it a little and split the polygons in the front of my model so that I don't have too many "irregularly" shaped faces to foul my model later. Heres where your creativity comes in, you'll want to do alot of your extrusion and nose design now, because if you wait till you've built up the rest of your ship, its far more complicated to make them or add them then it is to have them already built in when your model gets complex.

Also, never forget to delete the internal faces created by extrusions of multiple adjacent faces, these are unecessary, and make selecting polys and verts a pain in the ass later.

However, in the spirit of simplicity I decided to keep it...well... simple. I suggest you grab the the verts forming the "top" of your model and start moving them up sequentially to create a gradual sloping affect common to "space" navy ships. I played around with this before, and deicded that newer USN ships will share a similar sloping profile as you can see here:

http://www.dendezyn.net/aff/pics/tut7.jpg

From this base you'll want to start elongating your hull. I made two extrusions at the rear and one in front. The front extrusion I shrunk down to form the actual nose. Using the "move" tool on the new sets of verts, I completed my sloping affect and leveled it off to join with the portion that will form the main body.

http://www.dendezyn.net/aff/pics/tut8.jpg

At this point you might want to start making surface extrusions to give your ship a unique frontal profile, but its up to you. Also remember the the bottom of the ship should probably slope to form a slightly rounded appearance, in keep with the wet-navy design. I decided to leave it alone for the time being as I have plans to add some serious detailing as well as an underslung hangar and sensor-tower, but I'll save that for the next installment.

Ciao!

[Tel'Quessir]

More!

[The5thElephant]

Well I seem to be doing things right so far. :)

I just wish I had Maya 5 at home (only have PLE version) because to work on full Maya I have to work at school.

[Ammon Ra]

you have a sleeping bag? food and drinks? what's stopping you? :D

[The5thElephant]

I am going to take you entirely seriously Ammon and answer :) .

The computers at my school aren't very good...are set up terribly (I have to look way up to see the monitor and my neck gets so annoyed)...are in the middle of a crowded classroom....filled with 10 year olds (the building is for Kindergarten through 12th grade).....and I don't enjoy spending my free time at school.

But before the summer I am getting Maya 5.0 (low student price hooray!) and will be able to work well at home.

Here are a couple of examples of a WIP I am doing of ignus's Taiidani destroyer.

http://www.quintelephant.com/images/destroyer3.jpg

http://www.quintelephant.com/images/destroyer4.jpg

I have lots of work to do, but I use a process very similar to Alex's. For all aspiring modelers, use this method at first and then learn your own ways that derive from it. Polygonal modelling is hard to learn, not hard to do. Just keep working and you will learn faster than you expect.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I wonder if anybody needs a LightWave modelling tutorial...?

[Moe]

You gotta love the PLE... FOR NON-COMMERCIAL USE ONLY everywhere...
And Alex, great idea, keep going!

[Alex Drake]

Step 4: Differentiation

We spent the last few lessons defining the basic shape of our ship, now we want to begin to expand upon the basic design to make our ship a bit more unique. I've decided to add some ridge "flanges" to the ship that will run down its length. In order to do this, we want to select the faces on four of the ridges like so.

http://www.dendezyn.net/aff/pics/tut9.jpg

Using the extrude tool again, anf dragging my new faces out, I have my ridges. But wait, each face was extruded seperately, and even when the extra faces are deleted we're left with some very crappy holes in our model. To fix this, we're going to use another tool you'll find immensely useful, Merge Edge.

http://www.dendezyn.net/aff/pics/tut10a.jpg

Click the "Edit Polygons" tab and select "Merge Edge". Make sure you are in edge mode and you'll notice the edges capable of merging highlighted in a brighter blue. Merge all the adjacent edges around the gaps to get something that looks like this.

http://www.dendezyn.net/aff/pics/tut10.jpg

At this point you can play with the vertices to acheive whatever look you want, I fixed up the orientation of the outiside verts of the first three "collars" to achieve a more undulating look. At any rate, our ridges are done, but the ship is still a little too plain for my tastes, so we'll spice it up a bit.

Step 5: Detailing For Dummies

Now that we've got our basic profile setup and or flanges normalized, we can begin to pump up the detail. Since I decided to go flanges, i thought I might make the nose profile a bit more distinct, so I've decided to add twin-hammerheads. In order to do this we're going to ahve to grab 2-3 faces on either side of the trench that runs between our flanges, like so:

http://www.dendezyn.net/aff/pics/tut11.jpg

Using our handy extrude tool, we're gonna extrude twice, so we can have a bit more definition in the flanges. How you want to go about detailing the flanges is up to you, I chse to scale each iterative extrusion down a bit to add a more sleek and tapered look.

http://www.dendezyn.net/aff/pics/tut12.jpg

I'd just like to point a few more things to keep in mind. First of all, ALWAYS remember to delete the extra faces inside your model after you extrude, Also, you'll want to unify the edges of the adjacent faces. An easy way to do this is with the "Merge Vertices" tool, which is found in the "Edit Polygons" menu. By selecting the verts in question, you can use this tool to verge them into a single vertice. Make sure you do this after every extrusion involving multiple adjacent faces, the extrude tool does NOT retain the vertice links shared by the original faces, failing to do so will leave gaping holes in your model and often will befoul attempts at vertice and face maipulation later on.

http://www.dendezyn.net/aff/pics/tut13.jpg

Now that we've finished with the flanges, we're going to add a spot for a sensor tower to be later grafted on. To do this we'll want to select a face running along the top or bottom of the craft (I chose he bottom, because the "underslung" look is unique, and also theres no reason to have everything top-oriented, since the ship operates in a vacuum where "up" and "down" are relative). Use the extrude tool to pull it out a couple times. I decided to scale the edges a bit as well, to go along with the tapered look of the ship. Our final look will look something like this.

http://www.dendezyn.net/aff/pics/tut14.jpg

Step 6: Additional Touches

For the purposes of game insertion, we wanna keep the details to as much of a minimum as possible, since many details can be better expressed by textures. But there are a few things that can be added. I decided this ship needed a slightly less smooth look, so I extruded a few bumps along the top ridge (perhaps these will be PD clusters later on). I also added slight indentations on the "Hammerhead" flange, as well as a pair of indentations on the ship's side for the shuttle-bays. You can really go nuts here depending on your skill level. I personally don't have much, but the opportunity for further detail exists.

Heres a look at our nose now:

http://www.dendezyn.net/aff/pics/tut15.jpg

We'll deal with further detail, booleans, and begin working on the body and engines next time. So long for now!

-Alex

[Cabinny_San]

like your starting points, looks like this one will turn out nice. When you finish it must see.

[Luapo]

when making a model to import into HW2 how would i make sure that the object im making is the right size, because I have a feeling that my ship is too small but I do not know how to check.

[Alex Drake]

You'll need either the rdn tools for your version of maya, or the .hod -> obj converters. Afterwhich you can use 3D Explorer to convert the hw2 model into something readable by maya, then import it. Check the size of the HW2 odel against yours, then scale up or down to get your desired dimensions. Personally, I downloaded some plugs for maya that let me export to.obj and .x. Saves alot of time and hassle.

FYI: New installment later today.

[omiwan]

Wicked we need cool tuts like this THX!!

[Luapo]

I was wondering if anyone could spare me the time to teach me how to get my ship which is in a maya binary format into a format which HW2 can read. Also if anyone could help me texturing it would be greately apreciated.

Thankyou to everyong on this site as everytime time I have posted I have been greated with helpful information.

Thanks for helping the nooby.

[Pyro1]

Alex bro... that tutorial helps alot in the modelling of the 2nd Khar-Selim that i am working on... thanks, the khar has a similar style to that of this tutorial.

[Alex Drake]

At this point we can say that our nose is relatively complete, however, as I said before, the nose itself is not the end goal, but rather something to be used as a guide to construct the rest of our ship. To this end, we can simply let our imaginations go nuts.

Step 7: The Body Shop

Since the ship now needs some more "meat" on its bones, I'll start by extruding the "back" of the model out a couple times to give us some playing room for further edits. Also, I'm not satisfied with the overall shape of the craft, so I selected all the verts along the top and bottom and elongated them. This gives the ship a nice navy-ish look. Of course, this IS space, so lets not make the lower hull so regular.

http://www.dendezyn.net/aff/pics/tut16a.jpg

With that out of the way, we can start to make room for the engine housing. Since this is a smaller ship, the engines are going to be a lil' bit larger in terms of dimensions than the main body of the ship. So we'll extrude out a couple more sections and use the scale tool on the rearmost face to make it a wee bit larger for each iteration of extrusion to make it appear as if the sections "flow" into one another like so;

http://www.dendezyn.net/aff/pics/tut17.jpg

Step 8: A Bridge Too Far

With that out of the way, I've decided to mount three engines on this bad-boy. "But wait!", you protest, "Your design is too skinny for extra engines!". Well, you're right, so I've decided to add the extra engines externally. Stary by deleting the internal edges in the rear-face. Then duplicate the face, extrude the duplicated face out a bit. Then highlight the new faces seperately from the rest of the model and use the "Extract" tool. This makes your new extrusion into a seperate object from the main body.

Then create a new cylinder and rotate till its "open" faces are parralel with the sides of our craft. Then move it back till it sits roughly in the middle of your new extrusion. Make sure you scale it down to a respectable size (wouldnt want it to make the connectors biger than the body). After you've scaled it down to a respectable size, you'll want to make a boolean union so that we're left with just the circular connecting braces on the outside.

Now delete the face on the connecting section as well its parralel face on the main body of your ship. Move the connecting section forward till the edges of the now empty face are almost touching. Make sure you are in object mode and select both objects. Goto the "Polygon" menu and choose "Combine". Now we are going to perform a stiching operation to sew these two seperate polys together. Select the "Merge Edge" tool from the "Edit Polygons" menu. Your object will will be deselected, so make sure right-click it and choose "Edge" mode. The edges capable of being sewn together will be highlighted with thicker, brighter-blue lines. What follows is easy, just select each set of paralel edges till the objects are totally joined.

Step 9: Engine Orientaton

After doing this, create a new cube and move it toward the rear of the craft. This cube will form one of the secondary engines.

http://www.dendezyn.net/aff/pics/tut18.jpg

Your imagination is your guide! Heres what I did.

http://www.dendezyn.net/aff/pics/tut19.jpg

Once you've designed your first engine and placed it where you like, its time to duplicate it! Double-click the "Mirror" tool icon in the "Polygon" tab.

http://www.dendezyn.net/aff/pics/tut20a.jpg

Make sure you choose Z+, like in the screenshot, Goto object mode and select your engine part, then click "Mirror". This will create a duplicate object with a mirrred orientation, but unfortunately its still connected to our old engine, but by now we know just what tool to use, right? Heh, mebe not. Goto face mode, then select all the face of our mirrored object (be careful to accidently select any face from the original). Then choose the "Seperate" tool, which will make it into a sperate object. Now all thats left is to drag it into position o the opposite sode of the model's main-body. It should look something like this.

http://www.dendezyn.net/aff/pics/tut20.jpg

Step 10: Finishing Touches

At this point you may add details as you please. In my opinion, this ship needs an ops tower and small fighter-bay to compliment the shuttle bays located by the nose. How you add details is up to you, but here are some shots of the ones I chose.

Ops Tower

http://www.dendezyn.net/aff/pics/tut21.jpg

Fighter/Mecha Bay

http://www.dendezyn.net/aff/pics/tut22.jpg

With all of that out of the way, I thought you might like a look at the final product, so heres a look at the finished ship:

Reikar Shipyards Loki class Destroyer

http://www.dendezyn.net/aff/pics/loki_render1.jpg

Well, thats all folks, I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and found it useful in your own ship-design. If you have any further questions, dont hesitate to ask.

Ciao for now!

-Alex

[YellowKnife]

Very nice job :ninja:

[Pyro1]

how about some enigines? you have where they go... but what about the actual vents

[Alex Drake]

http://www.dendezyn.net/aff/pics/loki_render5.jpg

I kept it simple, you can detail them however you want. Remember, you dont have to go into ALOT of detail, textures will take care of the rest.

[Dpath2100]

I too have a question: are you God?

[Alex Drake]

Originally posted by Dpath2100
I too have a question: are you God?

:insane:

Not god, save those questions for Unicron, I'm still struggling to get to that level of design competence. I just made this tutorial to detail ONE unique approach to modelling in Maya, it is by no means the best or even remotely efficient (anyone who knows much about modeling is prolly screaming at the use of booleans, etc).

Happy to know someone enjoyed it tho.

[Lubatomy]

Outstanding tutorial. I was making my first truely unique ship following the same kind of approach. I had a nice elongated nose created and was working on the wings for my design before i messed it up. the idea wan that it would be a sort of interplanetary fighted designed for both space and atmospheric flight. it was rather nice. if i can find a version of it on my harddrive at home mayby ill post it. I have not figured out how to make the white background in maya yet when looking at the rendered model so it gets hard to see some of the details. To give you an idea of what it looked like though. The current day F-16 Eagle with the wings missing and the tail behind the cockpit missing is similar. My design had a cockpit on it that was similar to the cockpit on the Viper from Battlestar Galactica but not as elongated. It was not an aerodynamically pretty design but i thought it looked good. I hope I have a save of the model somewhere as I know I can not finis what I was trying to do after reading your tutorial.

[Sigi]

Originally posted by Alex Drake
[B]Step 4: Differentiation

Using the extrude tool again, anf dragging my new faces out, I have my ridges. But wait, each face was extruded seperately, and even when the extra faces are deleted we're left with some very crappy holes in our model. To fix this, we're going to use another tool you'll find immensely useful, Merge Edge.

Click the "Edit Polygons" tab and select "Merge Edge". Make sure you are in edge mode and you'll notice the edges capable of merging highlighted in a brighter blue. Merge all the adjacent edges around the gaps to get something that looks like this.


There is also the option for the extrude face tool in maya to "keep faces together". That will prevent those nasty unwanted extra faces from appearing. :)
If you forgot to do this while you wanted to keep faces together, you can still go to the options bar on the right and change the "keep faces together" option there, but only right after extrusion or unpredictable things might happen due to object history.

Sigi

[verybad]

Few things I'd reccomend to anyone modeling in *any* program. Set up a few hotkeys.

(in Maya I have extrude, bevel, and a few otehrs hotkey'ed) this saves ENORMOUS ammounts of time.

[The5thElephant]

Hmmmm, where do I set up hotkeys in Maya? I only have those tools placed in my toolbar, but no hotkeys.

Oh and on a side note, you feeling better verybad from your seizure?

[Cabinny_San]

it is by no means the best or even remotely efficient (anyone who knows much about modeling is prolly screaming at the use of booleans, etc).

Sorry If I screamed Booleans are useful but not for everything besides they cause more harm than good sometimes. I think your modeling skills are good and getting better every time I see them. We all are learners here even Unicron is still trying to learn things.

[Alex Drake]

Now to learn the next step, GREEBLES! (Cabinny, mebe you or Unicron should make a tut regarding THOSE, I havent found a good one yet and I'm desperate t know so I can make some nice hi-poly renders like you guys do).

[Alex Drake]

Hmmm, I'd like to use the most efficient methods possible, what are this board's modellers opinions on alternatives to boolean unions in Maya?

[The5thElephant]

It depends on what you have to do. Sometimes it is really easy to just merge edges or vertices when you have two holes and other times it is much easier to use a boolean union (though sometimes it gets glitchy where the whole mesh dissapears and you have to figure out a bunch of stuff to get it to work). But in some cases I find welding objects to others just doesnt work. For example if you are trying to merge a high # of edges shape to a flat plane it will be difficult and very annoying when you can just simple do boolean union.

[Alex Drake]

A taste of things to come;

http://www.dendezyn.net/aff/pics/asfrigate_render.jpg

[YellowKnife]

I payed for lessons!

Now teach...........PLS

:ninja:

[Alex Drake]

still waiting for the check. :)

Do you really want a tut on how to make that?

I was just saying that its the latest model for AFF (still needs some refinement). Thus its a taste of whats to come....for the mod. hehe

[Macanleister]

Alex, I'm just wondering which version of Maya you used. Is this the PLE version, and if it isn't, are the any differences between PLE and the version you used that are relevant to HW modelling?

[Avatar Terminus]

ya... don't have the raw cash for Maya 5, myself, though this tutorial does make me want to go and try me hand at everything I've wished I could do. :D

[Alex Drake]

I used Maya 5.0, it shouldn't be any different from 5.0 PLE.

[Bob McDob]

Excellent tutorial. I wish I had something like that when I was starting out.

[Macanleister]

Ok, thanks. I'll go and start downloading PLE.

EDIT: Getright can't get hold of the file. Does anyone know if the plugins work with PLE 4?

[Zatch]

The plugins don't work with any version of PLE.

[iamme]

Wow impressive! Care to put it ingame? ;)

[Alex Drake]

very soon grasshopper...