Great concept razeverius. I like your design. I agree that the supports should be bigger than the main hull, though.
As for your wacky open gl funkiness, there are several solutions. What you have, there, is what’s called an n-gon, which is a poly with more than 4 sides(quad). n-gons act funny when smoothed, since a smooth operation esentially splits all polys in 4,8,16 etc depending on the level of subdivision, and smooths it in that sense. What’s happening on your model is that your quads are being smoothed, but the n-gon (which has a VERY high amount of edges), doesn’t smooth so well. The operation is trying to do it’s best, but you end up with drawing errors in the open gl view, and most probably in the render as well.
Here is the idea behind a blimp or zeppelin (it is important to do research on your subject and understand the machinations behind it). There is a steel frame, split into triangles or quads (usually quads, I believe), then there is a canvas stretched over the entire structure. So, not only do you have ribbed edges flowing along the length, you would typically have ribbed edge rings going across the surface as well. Seeing the zeppelin in this light, you can create a cylinder with how ever many subdivisions you like (these would represent the actual metal structure under the canvas. You can then set these edges as hard edges (using edge weight-I can’t remember where the option is in maya, but you can ask your teacher). When you smooth the entire poly model, your edges should maintain crisp edges. If there is no edge weight tool in maya (again, I really can’t remember), you can select all your edges and under the normal menu, lock normals. This should have the same effect. Regardless, the following is an example of smoothing under different circumstances. I used Modo. These following examples only show how to deal with the caps, and not the hard edges.
1)This is a simple cylinder, one segment, 2 caps, that has been smoothed. You can clearly see how the caps get screwy.
2)I’ve added 1 edgeloop in the center, and made a large bevel on the edges of the cap set at 2 segments (this is the equivalent of extruding, pulling and scaling down the caps twice). Here you can notice that the cylinder is starting to really retain its shape after the smooth operation, but its still not perfect. Those caps are still giving me drawing errors because there’s just so many edges.
3)Here I’ve beveled the cap in one more time-the smaller the cap gets, the less the drawing errors are noticeable, but they are still there.
4)What I did here was colapse the final cap. All the points for the caps converted into 1 point, which STILL isn’t ideal, I’ve essentially created the opposite of a giant ngon. A pole (1 point) which has 12 edges associated to it. I would definitely have drawing errors on this one, as poles of this density also give off poor shading when smoothed, so I took it a step further. When you collapse a poly like I did, you end up with a whole lot of triangles. I selected every OTHER edge and deleted them. This gave me an entire quad setup at the poles. Granted, the shape is wrong for a zeppelin, but the technique would be the same. You would just have to shape it better than I did.
You can take this technique and combine it with the hard edge/edge-lock normal technique that I mentioned earlier, and you should be able to achieve exactly what you want with the best polygon economy.
One last option: You can select ALL of the edges, and run a bevel on them. When you smooth, you will get crisp edges, just like a zeppelin has. The only trouble with this is, if you get into the habit of doing it this way (the easy way) You end up with a CRAP load of polygons and this can drastically increase render time once you get to the end. Good topology and polygon economy should be something that you are conscious of throughout the modeling process.
Hope this helped. Clearly I had time lol. I just noticed the novel I wrote haha. Anyway, good luck in the challenge man and I look forward to some updates.
PS: By smooth, I was talking about convert to sub-d. My apologies for the confusion, if any. IN modo, polys and sub-d’s are one and the same, so I always call it smoothing.
Cheers
-Rage
edit: I realized my images were fuzzy, so threw in a closeup example of the poles, in tris and quads.
I could add this up to my portfolio.
