Troubleshooting

Here are some common issues you may come across: do get in touch if you have any questions.

When I duplicate the Starship it changes when I alter the original

When duplicating the starship object in Blender, it is always best to simply go to the Add menu again and select Mesh then Starship. This cleanly creates a new Starship every time.

Because of the way the Starship Generator uses Drivers to manage its configuration, duplicating the object by pressing shift-d or ctrl-c keeps the original drivers on the same object. This causes the original starship to essentially control the other.

Very Smooth Mesh

When changing the source objects the Starship Generator works with, you may sometimes see this effect where edges are overly smooth and switching off Shade Smooth does not help. This is because the Starship Generator object inherits the smoothing settings from whichever Big object it first chooses. By default, the Big objects have Auto Smooth activated, which should automatically sharpen hard edges.

You can rectify this in two ways:

Add an Edge Split modifier to the Starship object. This will split any sharp edges, although it does duplicate geometry along the edges.
Activate Auto Smoothing on your object. Go to the Big object’s Object Data Properties tab, go to the Normals section, and tick Auto Smooth:

Jagged Edges on the Pattern

The panelling is generated using procedural noise and can produce a jagged effect on close-up, especially on the corners of a model. To reduce this, look at decreasing or increasing the subdivisions on the object: See the note in the Panels Modifier.

Islands of disconnected shapes

Sometimes when generating a shape, the Mirror modifier will cause the reflected shape to produce islands of disconnected shapes. This is an artefact of the generation process. To remove the island will you need to collapse the Starship modifier and remove this shape by going into Edit mode, selecting the shape, and deleting. it. See the How-To section on Dealing with Islands.