start here-
then watch this
then this-
that should get your rolling a bit
Thanks, I have worked through these and have learned a lot.
I am trying something similar to my original post and have 3d printed some stuff but nothing usable yet.
I drew some surfaces because I was use to that.
some of the struggle with the subd is precision placement aligned to planes, so I am searching through the help file and videos.
I still have about 50 questions 
nothing to brag about yet.
Looks great! ask away, happy to help-
remember, if the goal is simply 3d printing, you can overlap closed objects, as opposed to having to trim/ Boolean everything… so for your scales, you can make one scale, array it, then flow them onto the surface and just print it with the whole pile of things overlapping.
you can typically save hours of trimming and boolean time.
these two parts will print identically.
1 Like
ok, I want to draw on top of my subd drawing. I want to put an eye and some fins.
do I draw on top? with what?
Or do I project a drawing ?
Or make a separate subd drawing to add to the main body?
also I could not get the reflection to reflect front and back.
I am going to have to figure out how to mirror, but the back side is not very flat.
yep, just make a new Subd part, or nurbs part for that matter and mash em all together.
somehow my main body is not a subd object after selecting the “Show SubD objects”
anyway on the perspective view shows the back side of the body and it is flat, maybe when I did a boolean split it converted to something else, I think it is a polysurface now, but I want to make the top part of the body hollow, and the bottom solid, i’ve tried converting to subd, to nerbs, and all i get is a big round surface.I tried shell, any ideas?
yes SubD will convert to Nurbs poly surface if you do a Boolean, trim or split on them,.
you will need to add a cap to make the body solid, and then boolean out the void you want in the top.