Platform ship
Thought you all might appreciate a little behind the scenes look at what goes into getting one of these meshes ready. Here's a couple good examples from the platform ship. The first image shows four spheres on + shaped stands that sit at the right-rear of the ship. You can see how the textures are a little off. The second pic shows what the spheres look like after the textures are adjusted.
The first job though is splitting the stand and the sphere into two separate objects so we can work on them independently. When I did that I found the stand was two criss-crossed sections that actually pass through each other. For a cardmodel this has to be altered so you can actually build it. The stand also just extends up inside the sphere - another issue to deal with.
The third pic shows the original stand, and what it looks like after it's been adjusted so you can actually build it, and stand a sphere in it. More often than not, this process also creates distortions in the texture, so then you have to go back and fix that up.
There are some time savers though. You'll notice there are four spheres, two large and two small. I really only have to clean up one of each, then clone the cleaned up ones, and delete the other two originals.
For the stands, I fixed up one, cloned it, scaled the clone up a bit for the larger spheres, then cloned each of these once more to get the four stands.
That's 8 of the 60 objects in this mesh. Many others had similar intersections as well, each requiring individual attention.
I'm getting close to finished with this ship though. I still have a number of parts to clean up, and the main platforms present some challenges. I'm going to have to cut it up here and there so that the parts won't be excessively large. I'll also have to add some reinforcing pieces here and there too.
Of all the ships we've done so far this mesh has taken the longest to prepare. I've probably put between 15 and 20 hours into cleaning up this mesh so far, and I estimate at least another 5 hours yet before it's ready for unfolding. Considering that's 2 and half working days, you get an idea of why it sometimes takes a few weeks to get one of these out the door (and why I'm seriously thinking about that tutorial sign1).
Stay tuned,
SJ
