Blender Design Iterations

I just put up a sub on Thingiverse, based on board game art from Underwater Cities. There was another sub, part of a bigger "replacement parts", but it was relatively plain.

Final Piece

I went through about 14 different versions - with each one getting closer to the final piece. The first useful piece was adding a camera in the side panel, so I could look at the picture of the sub WITH the model.

Version 7 - Adding Camera View

You can see in the upper right panel, you can see a bunch of pieces in an Outliner panel. In the middle right, you can see a camera shot in a 3D Viewport. (There's a lower right, where a properties panel is.) The jpeg of the box front was added using shift-A>Add Image, and I changed the rotation and scale to match the idealized object.

The iterations were roughly 3 categories of work:

1. Getting it to look like the sub in the picture (70% of the total work)
2. Making it printable (25%)
3. Giving it characteristics of a game piece (5%)

Getting it to look like the sub in the picture

A lot of this process is just taking standard shapes and modifying them. The buoyancy tanks are the same — I took a cylinder, did some loop cuts for the ridges that stick out. I copied a couple of UV spheres, turned them on the sides, aligned them with the ends of the cylinder. Select the vertices of the spheres that weren't visible and delete those vertices. Remove the ends of the cylinder, then boolean>union the spheres to those ends. In Edit>Vertex>Remove Double Vertices, to clean up problems. You can either copy it, or use Modifiers>Mirror>Apply.

Honestly, the shoulders and sacs were the messy parts. Shoulders were a lot of proportional editing from a cylinder. Look under the shoulders, there's a strange "sac". It was a isomorphic sphere, that was stretched on the z-axis, added a wireframe modification, and then I removed some vertices to make planes. This next part falls under making it printable: I tried to make it a pure mesh sphere, but it never quite turned out....so I took the inner areas of the holes and turned them into faces. (And the other internal faces I removed, so it would be a manifold object.)

I probably spend way too much time cleaning that up.

Making it printable

The side headlights broke off occasionally — I tried to make them interesting by mounting them to a sphere, then mounting the sphere to the sub. The angled headlights would break off when pulling supports.

The buoyancy tanks were round on the bottom. I'd get weird layers too often down there, so I used Pivot Point>Active Element...selecting a bunch of vertices on the bottom of the main platform, and the lowest 3-4 pairs of vertices on the buoyancy tanks...then Scale>Z to have them scale to the last selected vertex. (As a reminder, when doing this, it can be helpful to look straight on, use "Z" to go into Wireframe mode.) This flattening took care of the weird layers.

The braces that reached the buoyancy tanks were just bars to start — I made them thicker as they entered the sub's body, but eventually also extruded them down on the z-axis through the tanks...this eliminated the tiny interior supports, as well as giving it a more solid-looking feel (necessary for the next part).

Giving it characteristics of a game piece

It was too tall (z-axis, solved by shrinking the dome and the dome cage on the z-axis, then scaling out on the x- and y-axis.). The shoulders and sacs needed to expand in the x- and y-axis (primarily by using Scale).  Keep in mind, these were all separate pieces...making it easy to scale each piece, but also taking longer because I wasn't doing a single operation.

I put the angled headlights forward more on the model, to give a cleaner look. I did not include the "probes" that were on the right side of the sub's art...they were going to be too thin and easily breakable.

These were all relatively easy fixes. If I was more of a designer, I would probably have stronger (and earlier) design principles to fall back on.

Overall Learning Experience

If you're sweating a piece, maybe you're doing it wrong. I probably worked on the mesh sacs for too long. There were simple brute force methods that would have been fine. The dome brace was done as a separate piece, I should have just made it part of the dome. The buoyancy tanks on the bottom, I wanted perfectly round — for no real necessity. (The tanks had those brackets going all the way around, so that first layer was trying to keep those, but then have the tanks.) I printed multiple versions, trying to make the smallest change for the best result.