Retexturing the Dreadnaught

I've just loaded up the Dreadnaught model and tried to retexture it.

Originally I'm more of a Cinema 4D guy and I have some decent experience with it, but it doesn't seem to run with wine here anymore. Since I don't want to switch to Windows, this will be an excellent opportunity for me to learn Blender.

I've already created a nice metal material with the Node editor (which is cool, but really hard!), but now I'm facing the fact that the model only uses triangles instead of quads for the faces, which leaves me with a big problem:

• The model is low-res and thus we can see the individual faces when I render it
• I can't just subsurface it, because that works really bad with triangles

Now I have to find a way to convert all the triangles so the surface looks flat. :sick:

Edit: Alright, "Mesh->Faces->Tris to Quads" fixed that problem for me. Now I still have to get it more detailed, seems like I need to do that manually for each part where the ship looks odd.

Edit: "Mesh->Faces->Shade Smooth" makes it possible. It's just a lot of work to do.

Yeah going from high poly to low poly is much simpler then going from low to high I think.

it looks like there is enough detail that if you smoothed the hull that it would look pretty seamless, but it may get a little hairy in areas where the vertex concentration goes from very low to very high.

Edit: Alright, "Mesh->Faces->Tris to Quads" fixed that problem for me. Now I still have to get it more detailed, seems like I need to do that manually for each part where the ship looks odd.

Thanks! i didn't know how to do that. That helps a lot with making a paper model of the Storm Petrel.

I'm now doing it a bit differently. I am selecting the edges with ALT+Shift+LMB and then bevel them with CTRL+B so they don't go crazy when I smooth the thing out

I know that the thruster area is very complicated, but I think I can select the whole thruster "opening" and make it hard with W + Shade Flat. That is still some work to do, but it should work.

Now I have the definitive solution - instead of just converting ALL of the tris to quads (which creates too much garbage and makes some of the edges strangely intersect with each other) I just select the biggest part of the surface and convert that to quads.

See the attached picture and the smooth render result.

Originally I'm more of a Cinema 4D guy and I have some decent experience with it, but it doesn't seem to run with wine here anymore. Since I don't want to switch to Windows, this will be an excellent opportunity for me to learn Blender.

You should look into Virtual Machines. Using VirtualBox, VirtualPC, or VMWare, you can run a Windows OS inside a window, toggling between your real OS and the virtual machine easily. It can be difficult to obtain an image to use, but there are ways to create your own.