#32 - Assignment Models - Venator Star Destroyer 6
In this post I will outline the process of creating the engines for the Venator - of which there are ten. Conveniently, all of them are perfectly round, so I was able to use cylinders very easily to create the shape of each of them. The general process was using the extrude tool to pull the edges of the cylinder out, then forwards, then down again, or perhaps into a cone, until I had matched the shape on the schematic. Bear in mind that because I cannot seem to get all of the schematics on the same scale, I am matching the engines more closely to the top view schematic, with the exception of the two engines furthest from the center of the ship because they were simply too big to fit on from that viewpoint. I made them slightly smaller, then matched them to the side view schematic. As a result of this the engines may seem unbalanced, but on a ship that size with so many different variations it might be closer to the official thing anyway.
Once the shape of the cylinder was correct, I would select every two faces, skipping one face, around the cylinder on certain areas (mainly the end of an engine) and extrude these faces downward, creating the bumps that are seen in the schematic, and also giving the engines a more physical appearance. This process worked for all of the engines, the only real difference on any of them being how far I would extrude the edges and which faces I would then extrude downwards. On some of the smaller engines it would be every other face rather than every two faces. If there was a spare face I would have that pointing inside the part of the ship sticking out the middle at the back so it cannot be visible. There were some points where I had to reverse faces but this never caused a problem.
On the subject of problems, I have not had any issues with creating the engines that have caused me to become stuck, or have to seek help. The only problems I have had with these engines were when I extruded some faces down and had to spend quite a lot of time going around the cylinder deleting the remaining faces and target welding the left-over edges together. These did take a lot of time to fix, but it was never something I wasn't sure how to do, and now that it is done the engines look exactly how I intend them to look with no extra edges or faces. The only partial problem I have had is deciding where to make the extrusions, because there are some parts of the engine at the back which will never be seen. Therefore, I decided on these parts to leave them plain, otherwise there will be extra polygons out of view in the animation, and all these cylinders are already using a large number of polygons. It is only reasonable to try to limit the number of polygons on these particular objects to make up for it. Furthermore, the bottom - middle engine was almost invisible on the schematic, so the size of the tube connecting it to the main body and the position of this engine was decided by me. I have checked images online and they seem to be in the right place.
Once the five different engines were finished, I mirrored them individually onto the other side of the ship. I feel that the engine elements of this model have turned out very well. The main problem was that they were very time consuming, especially on the details, but I have made appropriate cutbacks on some details and now they look very much like the schematic, as well as how an engine might look on a spaceship. Something which I found quite amazing was that I was able to create the entirety of all five engines using only the extrude tool, which goes to show just how useful a single tool can be when used for the right task. There were a couple of exceptions, such as using the reverse tool to fix some faces and the bridge tool to reconnect some edges, hiding the gape between them, but otherwise, the entire shapes were modelled by only extruding edges on the end of each cylinder.
Once the shape of the cylinder was correct, I would select every two faces, skipping one face, around the cylinder on certain areas (mainly the end of an engine) and extrude these faces downward, creating the bumps that are seen in the schematic, and also giving the engines a more physical appearance. This process worked for all of the engines, the only real difference on any of them being how far I would extrude the edges and which faces I would then extrude downwards. On some of the smaller engines it would be every other face rather than every two faces. If there was a spare face I would have that pointing inside the part of the ship sticking out the middle at the back so it cannot be visible. There were some points where I had to reverse faces but this never caused a problem.
On the subject of problems, I have not had any issues with creating the engines that have caused me to become stuck, or have to seek help. The only problems I have had with these engines were when I extruded some faces down and had to spend quite a lot of time going around the cylinder deleting the remaining faces and target welding the left-over edges together. These did take a lot of time to fix, but it was never something I wasn't sure how to do, and now that it is done the engines look exactly how I intend them to look with no extra edges or faces. The only partial problem I have had is deciding where to make the extrusions, because there are some parts of the engine at the back which will never be seen. Therefore, I decided on these parts to leave them plain, otherwise there will be extra polygons out of view in the animation, and all these cylinders are already using a large number of polygons. It is only reasonable to try to limit the number of polygons on these particular objects to make up for it. Furthermore, the bottom - middle engine was almost invisible on the schematic, so the size of the tube connecting it to the main body and the position of this engine was decided by me. I have checked images online and they seem to be in the right place.
Once the five different engines were finished, I mirrored them individually onto the other side of the ship. I feel that the engine elements of this model have turned out very well. The main problem was that they were very time consuming, especially on the details, but I have made appropriate cutbacks on some details and now they look very much like the schematic, as well as how an engine might look on a spaceship. Something which I found quite amazing was that I was able to create the entirety of all five engines using only the extrude tool, which goes to show just how useful a single tool can be when used for the right task. There were a couple of exceptions, such as using the reverse tool to fix some faces and the bridge tool to reconnect some edges, hiding the gape between them, but otherwise, the entire shapes were modelled by only extruding edges on the end of each cylinder.
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