Fire Hydrant

Dylan_Koroivatu

Hi, I'm Dylan, been modelling for a few months now so I'm still fairly new to all this. This is my first post here and thought I'd share a fire hydrant I modelled recently. This was modelled in Maya, textured in Substance Painter and finally rendered in Unreal Engine 4. Tri Count - 4.5k. All feedback is welcome.

Final Render

Wireframe

Base Colour

Roughness

Normal

The cylinders on the sides in the final product are separate objects, I would've extruded them from the main body but I used about half of its circumference to extrude the front cylinder, leaving no room for the side cylinders. I did try though but I ended up with a very imperfect circle.





I'm sure there would've been a better way to go about it. So again, feedback is welcome.

ducklover

As a solution, I would advise not to extrude cylinders from the main body but just add them as different cylinders and stuck through each other. In a place where they intersect just place a simple loop from polygons for better baking and a general look. Then unwrap all parts and combine them into a single mesh. You can delete all hidden geometry to save texture space.

Must say that I am not a pro and this is just one of the ways to accomplish the final goal.
Screens for better understanding:

Dylan_Koroivatu

ducklover said:

As a solution, I would advise not to extrude cylinders from the main body but just add them as different cylinders and stuck through each other. In a place where they intersect just place a simple loop from polygons for better baking and a general look. Then unwrap all parts and combine them into a single mesh. You can delete all hidden geometry to save texture space.

Must say that I am not a pro and this is just one of the ways to accomplish the final goal.
Screens for better understanding:

Took your advice and didn't extrude from the main body but I didn't use the same method. I stuck another cylinder through the body and combined them with a Boolean (union), then welded the vertexes together. I also made the front cylinder a bit smaller.

Celinecote

Hey Dylan. There are some topology things you could fix but I understand if you don't want to go back and rebake so this is more for future reference. 

You have a bit of pinching in this area caused probably by those long thin polygons. It's a little hard to see but if you turn up the specularity then it will become more visible. Sometimes pinching can just be ignored because once the prop is textured it can be pretty unnoticeable. In your case, I can't see it at all in your textured version but it's just something to think about when you do a prop that is shinier


You might be able to fix this by connecting the topology this way.


I am also working on a hydrant and I'm hoping maybe it could help to see what I did. I believe it's ok to have triangles in certain areas as long as it doesn't create any obvious pinching when smoothing.


Lastly, there is this really great video by FlippedNormals where they cover making inserts into cylindrical shapes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7HG6XJsKoQ

This is looking really great though! I hope this helps

Dylan_Koroivatu

Celinecote said:

Hey Dylan. There are some topology things you could fix but I understand if you don't want to go back and rebake so this is more for future reference. 

You have a bit of pinching in this area caused probably by those long thin polygons. It's a little hard to see but if you turn up the specularity then it will become more visible. Sometimes pinching can just be ignored because once the prop is textured it can be pretty unnoticeable. In your case, I can't see it at all in your textured version but it's just something to think about when you do a prop that is shinier


You might be able to fix this by connecting the topology this way.


I am also working on a hydrant and I'm hoping maybe it could help to see what I did. I believe it's ok to have triangles in certain areas as long as it doesn't create any obvious pinching when smoothing.


Lastly, there is this really great video by FlippedNormals where they cover making inserts into cylindrical shapes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7HG6XJsKoQ

This is looking really great though! I hope this helps

Thanks! I'll give it a go next time