Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Refining the Cockpit Housing Video



I've had a rough layout of the body for a while and now the fine-tuning has started.  The video is primarily of refining the cockpit housing.  The main difficulty was building an odd-ball primitive to build off of.  It was 16 sided but not all sides were the same length and I had to put in some odd loops to accommodate the scoops that go over the tentacles.  I wanted to box-model this piece so it would flow well from the tentacles, up and back to the main body.  Due to the odd shape, putting in edge loops was a challenge as well.







The further challenge will be cutting each body piece to fit with the other, then extruding those pieces so they have thickness otherwise they can't be printed) and figuring out a way that they will all fit together during the physical assembly of the printed model.































The mesh has to be really dense so it will print without showing any polygons.  This part is a good candidate for decimation which will reorganize and reduce the amount of polygons used.