StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I'm trying to get back into 3d modeling, something I have really touched since high school back in 2006. I was never anything special at it, but I also feel that I was never given much to go by from my teacher who was anything but creative himself. As such, there are serious holes in my technique and large gaps in my knowledge, things which make doing things equivalent to a sketch difficult.

As such I'd like to ask for advice from the 3d artists among our members.

My current project is going to be a simple model of a T-34 Medium Tank, the pictures I'm working off of are:





What I do know is that I'll place the top set of images in my scene, to scale and work off of them to create my basic shape. What I'm unsure of is if I should trace each view, and extrude, or start with a primitive and shape it from there? This isn't the sort of work we covered in high school, our curriculum focused more on creating things from scratch rather than working towards a well-defined goal.

Given the simplicity and regularity of the shape, I would suggest spline extrusion. Take the cross section, draw out the hull, then extrude. You can then boolean cut the forward and aft profiles out. The terms will vary a bit depending on what package you are using, but the principle should work for all of them.

fractalsponge1 wrote:Given the simplicity and regularity of the shape, I would suggest spline extrusion. Take the cross section, draw out the hull, then extrude. You can then boolean cut the forward and aft profiles out. The terms will vary a bit depending on what package you are using, but the principle should work for all of them.

Thanks, I tried doing it with primitives and wasn't sure if I was doing it the hard way, or was just that unskilled and out of practice.

Jub wrote:Thanks, I tried doing it with primitives and wasn't sure if I was doing it the hard way, or was just that unskilled and out of practice.

A lot of the time, it's a case of one of the not-much-spoken truths of doing anything creative on a computer; "there is rarely only one One True Way™ to do anything". A lot of the time it depends on how your visualisation of what you want to do works, and how your favourite modelling program works. Sometimes it'll be drawing a spline and extruding, sometimes it'll be sculpting from primitives. I'm a regular on the DAZ3D forums; DAZ sells Bryce and Carrara as modellers, but many of the content creators there also use any other modeller you've ever heard of. Really, only experience will tell you what works for you.

FWIW, this looks interesting; there are a lot of tank models around, for sale or free, but I don't think I've seen many T-34s. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right places, it is a pretty iconic WW2 tank.

What 3d program are you using? I do 99% of my modeling in sketchup, and I've modeled a rough T-34 before.

My workflow would be:
Set up all the views in their correct orientation and to the same scale - proper scale isn't important unless I know the size of some parts that I know exist but aren't shown in the drawings (bolts, gun bore). Make the views a group and lock them.

Trace the profile of the hull in the side view. Once I've got a good face generated, pull it out an arbitrary distance and make it a component.

Flip it and stack it back-to-back with the other one, so I've got 2 halves of the tank to work on.

Continue adding detail and making fixes from other views from there. In Sketchup specifically, it's important to group distinct pieces of geometry (hull, turret), but make components out of repeated geometry (track-links if you're going for that detail, wheels, bolts). You can't go wrong making *everything* a component, but you can making a group then copying it before you make it a component.

SpottedKitty wrote:FWIW, this looks interesting; there are a lot of tank models around, for sale or free, but I don't think I've seen many T-34s. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right places, it is a pretty iconic WW2 tank.

World of Tanks has a model of the T-34 in it. If you're looking in the right places you can probably either find an extractor or find an already extracted version. Here's one I found in the warehouse for free.

I should have posted the program that I'm using. I started with 3ds Max R4, and still have a full physical set of documentation for it (the school gave them away when they were about to jump up a few versions). Now I'm using 3ds Max 2016 so I can retain some familiarity with the software. Now I know, working in 3ds Max for my purposes is like buying a $300 box of pencils and top end sketchbooks to play Pictionary, but it's what I have.

Here's what I have set-up to get started:



You can see line 2 selected. I want to draw the last section of my line, but instead of adding to line 2 it creates line 3. How would I go about resolving this?

I solved my issues with the lines, now to turn my three sets of lines into a solid object, if that's possible. I have very little experience with spline modeling, we mostly worked with primitives back in school.

Extrude the closed spline to start with. Or, you can apply surface modifier if you have a full spline cage.

Don´t extrude splines. It will give you bad topology which will make it rather obnoxious to work with later on. Instead of a spline start with a plane and extrude its edges to match the hull. That way you can control you topology a lot better.

Thanks for the advice salm. I'll try putting it to use once my computer gets down here, I just made a pretty major move and don't have most of my stuff with me.