Making your first ship

Overview

This page describes point by point how to create your first ship, and get it into Pioneer. You should be able to do this from scratch within an hour or two, having no experience whatsoever. We aren't intending to cover much detail at all, but will rather give a simplified overview, and point to other pages with fuller explanations for once you're comfortable with the process.

Prerequisites

To follow this tutorial you will need:

• A recent copy of Pioneer - using SGModel system. Anything since around Alpha 30 is fine
• A recent copy of Blender - this was written on 2.65
• A recent copy of GIMP - this was written on 2.8

Other 3D modellers or raster art programs will work fine, as long as you can work with standard formats such as Collada and .png

Step by step

Making a ship

Open Blender. The default scene should consist of a cube, a camera and a lamp. The camera and lamp are irrelevant and won't be exported, but that cube is going places ;-)

Box modelling

• Make sure the mouse cursor is on the view of the scene, then hit Ctrl-alt-'q' to switch to quad view. This allows us to easily check we have lined things up correctly.
• Shift-'a', then choose 'Mesh' -> 'Cube'. You've just added a cube to the scene. You won't be able to see it yet, as it's perfectly aligned with the 'default' cube. When you add things they'll appear where the 3D cursor is - you can move that around with the left mouse button, or snap it back to the grid using the shift-'s' menu.
• Move the mouse cursor onto the top down view, then hit 'g' to move the new cube. Hold Ctrl to snap it to the grid, and move it a little further in the plus direction along the Y axis (in the direction the green arrow is pointing). Leave it just touching the edge of the default cube.

• Make two more cubes, and leave them touching the default cube on either direction on the X axis. You can use Shift-'a' for Add, or Shift-'d' for Duplicate.

Editing vertices

• Right-click on the first cube we created to select it. That's the nose of our ship, so it needs to be a bit more pointed. Hold the middle mouse button in the 3D viewport, and swing the view round to get a better look at it.
• Hit Tab to switch to 'Edit mode'. You can now Ctrl-tab between vertex, edge and face edit mode. We should be on vertex edit mode already.
• Hit 'a' for deselect all. Right click on one of the bottom vertices at the tip of the nose. Hold shift, then right click on the vertex above it to chain-select it.

• Hit Alt-'m' for merge. Choose "At first". The vertices will merge, and any edges and faces between them are dissolved. Do the same for the other two vertices, to create a pointed nose.
• We can make the nose a bit longer, by selecting each of the newly merged vertices then typing 'g', 'y', '2', moving them both two meters further along the Y axis.

Joining and separating

You'll note that the only vertices you can edit are those belonging to the currently selected mesh - you have to Tab back to 'Object mode' to select another object, then Tab back to 'Edit mode' before its vertices become visible. If we want to 'fill in' the areas between two meshes, we either have to use another completely separate mesh which lines up with the others, copy part of one mesh into the other, or merge them.

• Shift-right click to chain select the 'nose' and the two 'wing' cubes. Hit Ctrl-'j' to merge them together into a single mesh.
• If you want to separate off a section, select it, hit 'p' and choose 'Selection'.

Creating edges and faces

• Now you can join up the section between the 'wings' and the 'nose'. Tab back to edit mode, and chain select two vertices. Hit 'f' to create an edge between them. Select three edges and hit 'f', and you'll create a face. You can also just select three vertices and hit 'f'. Blender will fill in the edges where needed
• If you go wrong, use the 'Del' key to delete edges and faces only
• If you want to make things a bit more complicated, try Ctrl-left clicking to create new vertices
• Hit 'z' to toggle wireframe view

Cleaning up

You should now have something resembling a simple space ship. Unfortunately, while we could import it into the game like this, we have a little bit of housekeeping due first.

We used the 'short cut' of building our model out of geometric primitives, instead of painting the vertices from the ground up. This means there are faces inside the model which will never be seen, and to reduce the strain on the renderer we need to delete them.