Milkshape Tutorial: Creating a Hollow Hull

This is an example of how you might create an empty hull in Milkshape 3D. I didn't read this from anywhere, I just came up with it since I wanted to do a spaceship that you can see into. I am sure this is not the most efficient way to do it, but it is a way I find works ok for most models where you have a polygon budget and since Milkshape lacks boolean operators etc.

Step 1. Create a the hull shape you require

For this tutorial I will use a slightly modified sphere. The important thing is to get the overall shape of the outside right at this point and furthermore, get verticies at the points that will be the edges of your windows.

Step 2. Cut out your windows

You simply delete any vertices that are where you want the glass to be.  Don't delete the vertices that that form the edge of the window. Just thones in the middle. For example, the picture below shows the result of deleting just one vertex.

If you haven't already, you should turn off, "Show Backfaces" in the perspective view. This will allow us to make sure we have the vertex order right. This is found on the right-click context menu of the view, about half way down.

Step 3. Create the inner hull.

Select the outer hull and create a duplicate by pressing Ctrl-D. After the duplicate is created, select the scale tool and type 0.9 into each of the X, Y and Z scale boxes, ensure "Centre of Mass" is selected as the scale origin and press the "Scale" button. This will scale the duplicate, which will become the interior to 90% of the out hull. Feel free to adjust that factor as desired. One technique I use is to set 0.99 into each of the boxes and keep pressing scale until it looks right.

Step 4. Make the inner hull an inner hull.

You will notice in the picture above that the inner hull actually looks like a second skin and not the inside of the hull. This is because the vertex winding is around the wrong way. This is fixed by simply selecting the inner hull, this is easily achieved from the Groups tab on the right and selecting Duplicate1 and selecting the menu option "Face"->"Reverse Vertex Order". This switches the normal around to point in the opposite direction, hence making it look like the inside. The only thing missing now is the sill around the window.

Step 5. Make the window sill.

This is by far the most laborious task. You have to set up the object in perspective view so that you can see the vertices in the gap between the inner and outer hulls. Select "Face" from the new object menu and you need to add all of the faces around the sill. You do this 3 vertices at a time and you need to select the 3 vertices in counter-clockwise direction. If you go clockwise the face will not be visible in which case you can either delete it and go the right way around or select "Face"->"Reverse Vertex Order" from the menu. This is a painful process which I had to use on both my flyer model for the milkshape competition and the cargo space ship. the cargo space ship pretty much took me one whole night to get right. So it takes a little patients and practice.

continue this process till you have gone all around the edge as shown below and you end up with the hollowed out shape with windows as required. Now we just need to put some glass in there.

Step 6. Make and place the window

For this what i do is create a box and delete all but 1 face which will become the glass. Shape it to the same shape but slightly larger than the hole you want to fill.

Create a new material which you can call whatever you like, but the important factor is to set the slider on the right, that I have circled in red to about half way. Later you can play with it to get the right level of transparency but about half way is a good starting point. You may also want to set the diffuse color which will act as the window tinting and give it a colour. With only the face selected that will become the glass, press the "Assign" button in the materials tab to give the face the glass texture. After assigning it, you can play with the settings more till the glass looks right.

Lastly, push the glass into place. have a good look around and make sure there are no edges of the glass protruding out. Also setting it into the sill a bit gives it a good look of depth.

Hope this helps someone. If you have any suggestions or other techniques that may be handy, please let me know and I will update this tutorial.

Cheers

Last update: 3/03/2005; 9:18:28 PM.