Need help with an indention technique
 

Ok, I pulled this screenshot of a modified LW mesh that i imported into maya. It's a trek mesh and i'm trying to figure out how to put windows in my own mesh to get the same effect as on this one. I do know a few things. These windows were done with the lightwave stencil tool so anyone familiar with that will know what i'm talking about here. Also, these windows were extruded from an origonal surface (Gray area) now i know how to extract the faces so i can change the material so don't worry about that. What i want to know is if there's an easier way than using split polygon and then extrude face.
Using animation snapshot i'm able to create a template for where windows should be but i wish there were a way to project that template onto the poly mesh ans have real vertices and edges just there. THen i could easily extrude the faces and extract to a new set of polys. I reall just want to get that perfect square cut. So... The effect i want is circled in green and hopefully the info i've given will give you guys some ideas. I'm just kinda stuck on getting edges and verts onto my surface mesh. THanks for your help people.
-Dave Berry

You could do it with booleans, but be careful to check up on the mesh so there are no anomalies.

I supose i could do that but the how would i get that perfect alignment with the surface. Any alignment techniques you know? ANyone elses have any ideas other than booleans? I'm just trying to see all options

Ok i tried the boolen method but i'm having trouble. WHen ever i apply any boolean my two poly objects just disappear. Any explanations?

split and extrue is the simplest form there is in any program. As far as a short cut for your task, I don't think it was explained enufe how you would like for it to be eazy. But that might be just me becouse I don't use the brail tool.

Do not use booleans. I have always found them to be very ineficant.

You've gotta be carefull using booleans because if they're not applied well then they can seriously screw up your geometry! You also have to make sure you select the objects in the correct order and applied the appropriate boolean (union, intersection or difference). I'd recommend just using the split-and-extrude method.

how close are you going to view the ship? because if it's not going to be zoomed in as far as you've got in that shot then I'd actually recommend using photoshop to create an incandescence map and maybe even a bump map.

If your going to make the Enterprise try only making holes of the windows your going to get close to and the other holes can be a transparency map. That way you can put more detail in the closer window(s).

You could use split polygon to create the windows then push in faces. I was also thinking of displacement mapping.

i considered split polygon too but i have ALOT of windows to do. so i need something that can be done en masse sorta.

I would say then to look into displacement mapping or make some texture maps rather than trying to model each window. I saw someone do the enterprise this way before and it was beautiful....used tons of mapping though.

this is true and mapping is the weapon of choice in most cases. The problemi have is that i'm looking to get some extrem closeups so mapping will show as it gets closer. But for a good mid/close shot mapping works fine

Think of your shot and just model the section that will be shown as a separate piece and try a displacement map.

displacement maps? are these the same as bump maps?

No. Bump maps change the surface normals where as displacement maps affect the actual vertices. You can read up on it in the rendering section of the maya docs.

For an experiment, create an alpha map of your enterprise windows in photoshop like you would make a bump map, with varying shades of gray to control depth. Save as a tif with alpha. Then, create a shader and plug the image into it's displacement attribute. Apply it to your geometry.