Behind The Scenes - How I Do Star Trek Panels!

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:01]Hello. Uh, Howie here. I thought I'd give a quick example of how I do uh some of the paneling lines here on my Star Trek ships. Um, it's a lot simpler than you might think. Uh, people have been asking to see wireframes, too. So, that's kind of the way they end up looking. Um, but a lot of this is just uh 3ds Max having some really handy features. These are extended in Maya and uh Blender as well.

[00:00:34]You can do the same thing uh in just about any dcc of your choice. Um, so I'll quickly give you a rundown of sort of the the mentality and methodology here. So say we have this sphere that we want to uh create some panel lines on.

[00:00:54]So, first thing I'm going to do is convert it to editable poly.

[00:00:58]Now, uh, one thing that you don't want to do when you're making panel lines is say you want to have a split somewhere along the edge here. You you don't want to make the panel line actually this edge here because the way that uh vertex and face normals work, uh, when that gets extruded inwards and then blended, you'll get this pinching effect. So, um, usually what I do if I'm going to be making panel lines and stuff, I create some control edge loops like that. Uh, I set the flow on those so that they give a little bit more curvature. And then I go in and I actually add my panel line that that's the one that I'll want to use. So, say I do the same thing here.

[00:01:50]get these guys a little bit more curvature like so. And then say we want to start splitting it there. So we grab this one, this one. Uh let's go ahead and do that and that. And then say we want to do this.

[00:02:13]And then we just deselect any edges that we don't want to have be panel lines.

[00:02:22]There we go. And then I just do a simple extrude.

[00:02:26]And I go in by 0.1 of a meter and by a tenth of a meter.

[00:02:35]And then I split that split the mesh.

[00:02:39]So, if I turn this guy to be the same gray as everybody else, you can see now, actually, let's rotate this so it's catching more of the light. You can see that we have nice normals and everything there. And then if we go in here, and this is the part that's magic. Uh, we add in a chamfer modifier. And this is um something that just goes in there and adds little chamfers to the edges and nice bevels. Um right now it's set to do anything that's a hard edge. And you can see that it's adding some additional chamers there in the corners. We don't want that. We just want to make sure that everything is uh you know set it to auto smooth. Um and since everything's broken, you're not going to get uh uh you know any any issues there. So there you go. Uh and then the next part of this is um oh I just unhid all and I think it might take a second. Basically you can use uh the 3ds Max boolean system to uh go in and add uh really nice details very quickly. Um, uh, specifically things like these, uh, escape pod hatches. Um, let me move this this guy over here.

[00:04:07]And yeah, so we've got these little escape pod hatches here, these little uh capsule shake uh, like access ports, little circular access ports. All that is just based on these guys right here, these three objects. So, um, basically I'm just going to hide unselected here.

[00:04:26]Uh, go into editable poly here, add a boolean modifier, and then the one you'll want to use is split. So, uh, what I use, uh, is, uh, select and place. I have a, uh, uh, key uh, a hotkey to tab on my end, but it's basically just this guy. Select and place. So you can just grab objects and place them on surfaces like so.

[00:04:53]So yeah, you can just kind of go in here and place these guys on surfaces and then rotate them to sort of align with the area that you want them to be in.

[00:05:18]like so. Uh, and then in your boolean operator, you just do split and you grab it and you just select these guys and bamo, you've got insets that are with the uh the uh chamers and everything.

[00:05:38]The topology is not bad.

[00:05:41]by default. There is some stuff that you might want to clean up. So once you've done that, if you go in here and you go into vertex mode, if you have things that are too close to each other like this, you can just uh do a a collapse on those and it'll because these are split, it'll actually collapse both the inner uh piece here and the outer piece separately. Uh as you can see when I select these verts here, it says I have two vertices selected. So yeah, you definitely want to do that on anything that's too close to each other because uh the chamfer modifier can freak out when that's when that stuff is going on.

[00:06:19]So yeah, you just want to select the outer two or outer four I guess. And uh there you go. So then if you drop back into your chamfer, there you go. Very clean.

[00:06:38]And that's how I do all my paneling. It takes very little time to go in and and uh work up a uh work up a shape like this. Most of it is just making sure that you do the trick that I showed earlier with the not doing this edge splits on the actual curvature edges. You want to do them either near them or midway through like these guys are. Uh and that way you get nice clean shading. Anyway, I hope this helped and uh was educational. Thanks for taking a look. Bye.