A Good Place to Start?

[Archer]

Hi all,

I have been visiting this site for a couple months now to check out the gallery every now and then, and I am amazed at the quality of the work posted here. I especially am fascinated with ships and would really love to be able to produce such awesome work some day. However, I've searched the internet but I can't find a good place to "start" learning about 3D modelling as far as ships and vehicles go. I have found Blender, which seems to be an awesome tool for modelling, and I have read some of the tutorials on it, but I'm hoping to find some tips and tutorials on how to go about creating something as detailed and complex as a ship.
You can probably tell that I am a complete newbie to 3d modelling so I don't really expect to jump right in and build an aircraft carrier for my first project, but I was just hoping that someone who is a seasoned veteran at ship modelling might be able to guide me towards a good place to get started.

Thanks, and sorry if I posted this in the wrong area!
-Archer

[kevjon]

Good place to start.....thats a tough one. Blender is quite good for starters and I've heard you can also get reasonable renders from it. Maybe start off with some of the simpler objects on a ship, like guns and turrets and try to model those, then work your way up to the more complicated objects as you begin to come to grips with the software. For modelling the hull you would need to learn sub-d techniques where a rough low polygon shape is modelled and smoothed with sub-d modifiers of the software. There are lots of car tutorials which will give you a guide as to how sub-d modelling is done and there is some good sticky posts in the obstacle course of this site as well which are well worth a read and some tutorials are suggested.

[Archer]

Yep, I hope to start with small things like you said, (turrets, objects on deck, etc.) but how do I go about actually modelling them? I know that there is something to do with plans and line drawings, but how exactly do I model, say, a turret? (remember, I'm a complete newbie when it comes to these things :P)

[kevjon]

Sorry Archer, we can't teach you these things on this forum. You need to search on the Web for tutorials and then figure out with your software how to do them. There probably won't me that many tutorials out there for blender compared to applications like Max or Lightwave.

[denders]

Well, first off, if you haven't found your way to this forum, you might find it interesting.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/forumdisplay.php?f=91

It should be the Blender forum there.

I found that forum first, then found my way here from there. You will also find this one interesting.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=252648

Its aircraft modeling, but it might help with ways to start and its Blender.

[Spinner]

http://www.blenderwars.com/tut.php?module=index

[Big Red 11]

If you have the money, go for modo. It's the easiest to learn out of any software. It took me a week to start effectively modeling with it, and I was a complete newbie like you. My advice would be to model some simple, common objects to get a feel for the controls, layout, tools, shortcuts, etc. This will smooth out your modeling process when you tackle a ship.

[Archer]

Thanks for the links, they have been very helpful so far with getting to know blender and how to work with it :)

I understand that you guys can't teach me exactly how to do things, but I was wondering if there is a basic process for modelling real-life pbjects in 3d? You have to start somewhere, right? For example, when you start creating a real-life plane or a tank, I can't imagine that you just start drawing it off the top of your head and then put a texture on it and then its finished:confused:

If I finished one of the basic tutorials on the blender site (specifically, this one on wikibooks: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro) and I understood how to use tools and the interface in Blender and wanted to try out, say, a turret, where would i go from there? I can't imagine it would be as simple as adding in a cube with some barrels sticking out of it :\

I guess what I'm asking is for some tips on where to go to start learning how to model real objects and eventually vehicles and ships mainly; Where did you guys start off that helped you to become such amazing artists?
Is there a web site devoted to 3d ship modelling somewhere out there that I haven't uncovered?

Sorry for the noob questions:err: , I just hope one day I can create a model that looks as amazing as the ones posted here!!

[kevjon]

Well you need to get hold of blueprints of the object you wish to model and map those images, front, top, side views to image planes inside your application and then model over the top of them. See the intel section for links to places to search for blueprints.

[Lukem]

I think (my opinion here), if you can model a chair (replace with other simple object of choice) you can model a tank. It's the same principle. As Kevjon says, load up some reference images, take a cube primitive and start realigning the points to match your reference images - add some more points; align those, and so on. With a plane or a ship, I haven't got a clue, but I'm sure it's a similar method, just on a larger scale.