I want to do some Star Trek kitbashing. Do I have to learn Blender now?

March 15, 2020 6:01 PM

I have somehow gotten a bee in my bonnet (developed a hyper fixation) about a particular idea I have for a Starfleet ship concept. I don't know where it came from, it's weird. I think the only thing to get rid of it is to get it out onto something. Unfortunately, I don't draft. And I think I want to try more variations than is worth doing in plastic model pieces. How much 3-D design software am I going to have to get into?

I know there's a ton of 3-D software modeling in Star Trek fandom, for ship variants and customizations especially. Precisely the kind of thing I want to do. Assuming I'm looking to do mostly cut & paste, like a Galaxy class where the ventral side is a mirror image of the dorsal structure, or an Excelsior where the saucer is as thick as a Constellation class...how would I do that?

Can I download something free like Blender, grab some existing model files that people have shared, and start putting nacelles on backwards by tomorrow? Or is this something I'm going to spend the next six months learning the tools before I can start doing anything with this idea I'm stuck on?

Or, I don't know, are there people who take commissions? Instead of 'draw my fursona', is there an outlet for people who want to see their fantasy of - I dunno, a TOS-era version of an Oberth class, with a big spinny orange Bussard collector at the front of a grey cylindrical secondary hull? I don't have any money, though.

posted by bartleby to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (4 answers total)

Blender definitely has a learning curve, but you can get the basics pretty quickly. It's been awhile since I've used it extensively, and I haven't used the newest version at all, but one place to start is Blender Guru. There are lots of other tutorials and lessons all over the place, including Youtube.

BlendSwap has a large model collection (and scripts, textures, etc). I just did a search for Star Trek and pulled up the these.
posted by lharmon at 6:45 PM on March 15, 2020 [2 favorites]

Blender recently updated their interface to make it work more like what people are used to, so that part should be a bit easier than in older versions. But there can be a lot of non-obvious things to learn to do even seemingly simple tasks, so it will take some time to learn the lingo and the tools.

Blender is free though, so there's little risk to installing it and trying it out.

A lot of models you can get will have been output using triangular polygons instead of quads, and those will be harder to work with (if not impossible) for what you want to do. So if you're looking at getting a model see if it indicates whether it's tris or quads.

If the models have image textures applied, cutting the meshes up/welding them to other meshes can really screw up the texture mapping. Learning texture mapping is a whole skillset, so be forewarned.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 6:59 PM on March 15, 2020 [1 favorite]

If you can settle for 2D how about using something like the Toolkit Freebies at the bottom of this page to cut and paste parts to make your ship?
posted by Rob Rockets at 7:53 PM on March 15, 2020 [1 favorite]

On the off chance that you're a computer programming type person, OpenSCAD might be suitable. It's a lot easier to become productive with than blender, but a completely different way of working. It's good for inorganic, mechanical shapes, not so great for organic shapes. It's not great if you mean to uv-unwrap and texture the models though, as the meshes it makes can be a bit weird (can have many small triangles in corners and such that someone using blender would not have created.) I use it to create placeholder models of space craft for my star-trek-ish game Space Nerds in Space. (And then I live with the placeholder models forever.)
posted by smcameron at 8:23 PM on March 15, 2020 [1 favorite]