Question about modeling ships with interior and exterior

Unity Engine
1

First off, I use Blender, but I don’t think that’s relevant to my question. I am modeling a shuttle craft. I have the exterior done. What I am now trying to do is the interior, and I’m having trouble getting it to “jive” with the exterior. . My first attempt was to make a copy of the exterior, scale it down a little, and then put it inside the exterior with flipped normals. This almost worked. Where it didn’t work was where there were windows or at the exit hatch. The scaling threw off the alignment of these things. The other issue with that method was, at the windows and hatch, even if they did line up, they aren’t connected. There is a visible gap between the meshes at the windows and door where there should be faces that connect them. I couldn’t figure out how to connect two meshes that were of different objects.

Anyone have a best practice suggestion as to how to take an exterior model and use that to create the interior? I imagine you almost have to start with the exterior because the interior should conform mostly to the exterior shape.

2

I know nothing about Blender, other than what it is. Bearing that in mind …

I would hazard a guess that you are almost there. What you need to do is connect/join the two meshes in Blender by creating polygons to bridge your inner and outer meshes. In some packages it is literally “create polygon”, in others it’s called something different.

Alternatively, if you are concerned that merely copying and scaling down the outer skin is not giving you a good inner skin, how about taking the external skin (with holes for doors/windows/other apertures already cut) and then extruding it inwards? (Or taking the inner skin as your starting point and extruding outwards?) In most packages this will give you better results and automatically create the bridging polygons around the apertures.

And don’t forget that you can also exercise some lateral thinking … For instance, rather than having a complete model of your ship, with both inner and outer polygon meshes, you could jump between completely different meshes on going through the hatch (especially if there is an airlock or some such that the player has to pass through). Whilst a bit more complicated, this would allow you to cheat your layouts as you saw fit.

Hope this helps.

Regards.

3

Actually, that’s not a half bad idea, that last one. Hadn’t considered it, and not sure this is exactly what you meant, but I could create a separate mesh for the hatch and just plug it in as the bridge between meshes. Same thing for the windows. I can see that working.

On the extrusion, I was trying that last night, but I couldn’t get the results I was looking for. I naturally thought that would be the solution for the reasons you pointed out, but it just wouldn’t work right. For example, I would select all the faces on one side of the exterior and tried to extrude them in, but every time I tried it, it wouldn’t extrude. It just wanted to move in the faces I selected. I do know how to extrude in most cases. I used it to create the hull, after all. But I just couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t letting me extrude those faces.

4

Well, like I say, I know zip about Blender, but I’ve just watched a couple of YouTube videos on the Blender extrude tool and as far as I can make it it’s what you need. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjOSkSQtGOM). If Blender is anything like other 3D packages the extrude tool will have a load of options as regards keeping the polygon faces you are extruding grouped, bevels and so on, so maybe have a close look at the small print on your extrude tool? Otherwise hopefully there is a Blender guru here who can help you better than I!

Regards.

5

Have you tried the Solidify modifier?

6

Take a look at the NASA shuttle, or any of the Rockets that are used, or a jet, or a passenger plane, or a liner, or a car for that matter. The interior parts that are visible to us rarely resemble the exterior.

With that in mind, scrap trying to simply create a smaller shell on the inside. Consider the design of it (I’m assuming you want to be able to move the player in and out of it), take a look at the shuttle designs used in any Star Trek series, where would the engines go, the waste, the power source, cables and wires and electronics, venting, CO scrubbers so on and so forth. They’ll all take up space, so then consider the inner surfaces that would be built, with the same ship design in mind as a facade to all those inner workings, panels to keep stuff out of the way or in place. Needs to be space for seating, maybe a bed or two, eating area, depends on size of the shuttle and it’s purpose.

If you start taking all this into account, you’ll naturally create the interior over time and with a far more interesting appearance. You could use a very basic temp shell to build it all inside so you don’t go over the edges and build outside by accident.

When it comes time to join the exterior model and interior one. I’d suggest point modeling for much of it, and welding points and edges. Though because of the extra interior styling, you’ll find things are placed in a way that makes joining stuff together a lot easier.

Oh… don’t forget to take into account the hull too, make sure it’s wide enough to fit with your games universe (paper thin ship hulls are going to look out of place outside of captain paper and his adventures on planet wastebasket). It might seem overkill and an anal amount of effort, but I think when someone puts that kind of effort into a model, it’s instantly visible, and rises it way above the competition.

This is probably not at all what you wanted to hear, I just felt… inspired to write it. :stuck_out_tongue:

7

Well, you mentioned welding inner and outter hull points together. That was one of my initial questiions. The inner and outter hulls are two separate objects. In Blender, I don’t know how to make them one object so I CAN weld those points together. When they are separate, you can’t. As for the rest of it, I’m not really trying to create a masterpiece. I am a designer and programmer, not an artist. This is just for prorotyping, but I have discovered that I am not happy with using just a cube with interior and exterior. For some reason, it has to look like something resembling a shuttle, and I do have that on the interior and exterior. I just need to figure out how to tie up those little loose ends that I mentioned in the initial post. When all is said and done, I’m just going to pay someone to do all of the art for me.

8

THat would be a good idea :).
Or, use the create faces command (Ctrl -J (i prefer ctrl-shift-J). Should work.

9

There is no solidify modifier in Blender that I can find. Ctrl-J was the correct command, however, for joining the objects together into one mesh!