Simple ship modelling tutorial

[+WhiteBoySamurai 1,092]

Someone requested a tutorial on how I create model ships. While I’m not a pro by any stretch of the imagination, hopefully the information I provide here will be useful for new modders who want to try creating some vehicles for Strike Fighters.

 

For this tutorial, I will be creating a relatively small and simple model , the C-14 China Cat class fast attack craft.

Though designed and built in China, the Iranian Navy uses a large amount of these boats with many different weapon configurations, so they will be a nice object to have in the various Middle Eastern terrains.

When making a model, I think it’s a good idea to have some general goals in mind for how you want it to be used and how you intend for it to turn out. My goals when making this model are the following:

• Fast turnaround (because I have a massive backlog of mods already)
  
• Low complexity (so that nearly anyone’s computer can display a lot of them at once)
  
• Modularity (so I can easily create variants with different weapons as used by the real thing)
  

I am not terribly concerned with photorealistic accuracy in this case. I imagine these boats will be cannon fodder for most players, and I don’t envision anyone scrutinizing the model’s minor details like what often happens with flyable aircraft mods.

 

Tools:

To create this model, I will be using 3DS Max 2009, because that’s what the Thirdwire Exporter requires, and GIMP, because even though it has the worst user interface of any program made by man, I can’t afford alternatives like Photoshop. (Sure, GIMP is “powerful” I suppose, but it’s like a bent rocket with no fins.)

Note: You can still build models using other versions of Max or even its freeware cousin Gmax, though in those cases you’d need to send the model to someone with 2009 and the exporter. And you can certainly use other paint programs—In fact you really should if at all possible, because GIMP is absolute rubbish.

 

Step 1: Set up your diagrams

There are many good tutorials for this process, so I won’t cover it. While it is possible to make models without diagrams, it is a huge pain and involves a lot of guesswork for proper scale and proportions.

It’s very important to get the proper dimensions of the object you plan to model. Usually Wikipedia has it correct, but not in the case of the boat I’m doing today. Official sources list the C-14 as 17.6 tons (important for the data file later), 13.65m length (14m including motors and planks), 4.8m beam, and 1.9m depth.

 

Step 2: Lay down the hull

There are so many different ways to make a ship hull, and I probably don’t even know half of them. The method I’ll use for this vessel is to start with a sphere. I’ll give it 18 segments and radius of 2.4m (matching the 4.8m width of the boat). For larger ships, you’ll need to start with a much bigger object with many more segments.

Now, I’ll make the sphere into a bowl shape by using “chop” and a hemisphere setting of 0.5. Obviously you’ll use different settings depending on the shape of the ship’s hull, but in this case it’s pretty simple.

From there, I’ll convert the sphere to an editable mesh or poly. Then, I’ll make extensive use of the Scale tools, as well as moving vertices around by hand to get it into the proper shape.

Actually, I decided the most efficient way to do this particular shape is to chop off the rear half of the hemisphere, cap the hole, and then extrude it.

This raised area of the aft hull is easily done by slicing and extruding. There’s a machine gun pit, but we’ll get to that later because doing it the “easy way” is a somewhat advanced technique.

 

Step 3: Start the superstructure

 

In the case of this boat, it’s just a simple cabin. I’ll make it using a box and adjust the vertices as needed.

To reduce model complexity, I’ll paint on the windows and portholes later instead of cutting out transparent ones. 

By the way, don’t forget to delete the polygons on the bottom of the cabin. There’s no point in having the game render triangles that can’t be seen. 

Lastly, it’s a good idea to use the same “object color” for objects that you intend to have the same texture. It makes unwrapping and texturing complex models much easier to have everything organized that way, so you can just use “select by color” and have everything ready.

 

Now we have to do the mast. Oh god I hate doing these. It’s not difficult, just tedious.  Basically you just need to slap a bunch of cylinders together and carefully orient them using the rotate tool until you have the shape you want.

Unfortunately I will have to do two different masts, one for the anti-ship missile carrying variants, and the other for rocket carriers.

 

WARNING: The default setting for creating cylinders is 5 height segments and 18 sides. For the love of all that is good in the world, do not use these settings unless you're doing something like a battleship's main gun barrel. You will end up with polygon counts that are ridiculously high for no good reason. Height segments should always be set to 1 for straight cylinders, and for ship masts, 6 or 8 sides for each beam is plenty. Honestly, you can get away with rectangular boxes for these parts too. I’m doing just that with the crossbeams in this model.

 

Step 4: Cutting shapes

Let’s get back to that machine gun pit for a moment. One way to cut it would be to make careful and tedious use of the “slice” tool, and to be honest that’s what I was stuck using for a long time until I learned this other method. Here’s what to do:

1. Make a box, tapered at one end, and positioned to intersect the deck. (Make sure it doesn’t go through the bottom of the hull.) For example:

2. Highlight the hull, and then switch from “Standard Primitives” to “Compound Objects” in the Create tab on the right.

3. Under Object Type, click the “Boolean” button.

4. Scroll down to the Operation section. There are many different ways to cut one mesh with the other, but in this case I’m using “Subtraction (A-B).”

5. Click “Pick Operand B”  and click the box. The box will be gone, leaving a hole in the deck where it previously was. 

6. Convert the hull back into an editable mesh or polygon (right-click menu). Adjust vertices manually and do other touching-up as needed.

You'll end up with something like this:

 

That's the model so far. We still have weapons and other details to add, but I'll continue in another post.

 

General advice:

• Make regular backups of your models as you progress. It’s very easy to screw something up permanently.
  
• Name your components in a logical fashion. This really should go without saying, but common sense ain’t all that common. Having all the parts named and organized will make it much easier to do the hierarchy and data file, which are necessary to get the model working in game. And it also helps other modders later if your model needs to be tweaked.
  
• If something in the mesh is behaving strangely, the “reset XForm” tool solves almost all problems. It is highly recommended that you use it on all components before doing the hierarchy and before you start unwrapping. Be warned that you can’t undo this action, so backup first.
  

I hope this is useful to some of you. If some of you would like to "follow along at home," I'll post the China Cat work-in-progress max file in this thread and you can experiment with it.

Edited October 24, 2013 by WhiteBoySamurai

[+Julhelm 266]

I find it easier to start with a box for the hull and simply add vertical segments where I need them. It just gives more control initially when you are still blocking out the rough shape since you don't need to move a lot of verts around. I also generally place my reference planes well offset to below/to the side of the model so I can have it clean. It is possible to autokey the material opacity so you can control it using the time slider, which is more convenient than going into the material editor. Finally for the masts and rigging I find it much simpler and less frustrating to use the line tool to simply draw my masts, then convert them into polys when I'm happy with them. If you allow me to, I can post up some pics showing my workflow for unwrapping and texturing complex ships.

[+WhiteBoySamurai 1,092]

Thanks, Julhelm. I never thought of using animation keys to control opacity. I have used vertically-segmented boxes like you described for most of my bigger ship hulls, though (Ticonderoga, etc.) 

 

I'd love to see your workflow for unwrapping-- I'd have difficulty explaining it clearly and I bet I could learn some things from how you do it. Also, would you be able to show us an example of how you'd draw lines to convert to polygons?

[+Julhelm 266]

Converting the lines to polys is very simple. If you select your line, there's a checkbox under 'rendering' for 'enable in viewport'. Then just input # of sides and interpolation and convert to editable poly.

 

I put together a little breakdown using this Kresta cruiser that I modelled. It's for iOS so it had to be optimized yet detailed (it's 4000 tris). I made this using what I learned from doing all the ships for Pacific Fleet. Generally what's important is indentifying signature details early, and identify sections of less importance that can reuse other parts of the ship. This can even be done with ambient occlusion providing you plan your AO bake beforehand. It then no longer becomes necessary to have everything uniquely mapped since you can focus on mapping the important parts and then reuse parts of the texture for subsequent details. I also mirror all of my superstructures. It only needs to look right, so if you can cut corners do so. The benefit to doing all of this is that it significantly reduces the turnaround for a ship, which was important to me (because I had to make so many of them in addition to islands, particle fx, shaders, GUI etc). So keep things as modular as possible, and reuse as much as possible. About the only thing that really needs to be all properly baked AO is the deck and even then you can reuse stuff for small platforms etc.

 

Edited October 25, 2013 by Julhelm