Struggling to model blade in Plasticity

Boozebeard

Hello, I'm trying to get to grips with pasticity but I'm struggling to find a way to model the fairly complex curve on the top of these blades/claws.



After a lot of different attempts this is the best I've come up with far, but there's still some weird shading and adding clean fillets to the topolgy is difficult.

pior

Well ... this is precisely why this kind of "stylized scifi" stuff is just much more approapriate to build as a subdiv model rather than in strict CAD. This type of models/designs are filled with such impossible transitions like what you have here ; and as matter of fact finding ways to handle them is a big part of the job of a hardsurface modeler doing stylized models.

It's a different kind of pinching than the ones caused by uneven/poor topology. It really comes from the design itself, and can't really be dealt with using a strict CAD approach. In the case of a real life prop like the reference, it would simply be solved with a bit of sanding  

iam717

pior said:

In the case of a real life prop like the reference, it would simply be solved with a bit of sanding  

Been thinking, as much "effort" as we put in why not start making things, irl with irl materials, seems like the same amount of effort and you perhaps make the texturing quicker than in application.  If i knew how to program and wire, I'd make all my stuff into motion-filled action figures with lights and all that, lot of work in the end and doubt if made into production anyone would pay for somewhat useless items.

sacboi

@Boozebeard

Not sure of the method you're using to generate that solid object or what does seem to appear double adjacent lines to form a hard edge which in and of itself defeats the whole purpose of implementing a CAD NURBs biased workflow?!

 

The off-axis transitions are fairly straightforward to create using this app, since it's ethos is built around an influenced artist friendly design.

To start with, I'd suggest either re-sketch the object's boundary region using the spline or curve tool, then simply extrude the volume to apply fillets or indeed explore boolean operations authored by it's developer so really quite a powerful feature packed little piece of software.

Anyway, once you've obtained a working knowledge I highly recommend, that's if you're interested in hard surface game asset creation of course, this end to end weapon tutorial, for the price of x3 cappuccinos from your favorite barista   

Promise, you'll learn a ton (I did) and most probably not look back to applying turbosmooth or subsurf, ever again.

pior

@sacboi : well, the double lines on the red model are simply fillets. IMHO this issue isn't so much the CAD execution, looking quite good here ; but rather the fact that the *design* itself features a so-called impossible transition from an angular piece (top view) to something close to a perfectly smooth surface (blade in side view).

That kind of stuff is a dead-end in CAD, whereas a subdiv workflow can hide the crimes quite well. Perhaps aided by a little bit of tweaking of the normals for good measure.

It's actually clearly noticeable in the reference :


So doing it in CAD would be better done by first constructing it as such (with a clear bend in the blade) and *then* filleting it as smooth as possible, as opposed to trying to start from a perfectly smooth/coplanar set of red lines.

Boozebeard

pior said:

So doing it in CAD would be better done by first constructing it as such (with a clear bend in the blade) and *then* filleting it as smooth as possible, as opposed to trying to start from a perfectly smooth/coplanar set of red lines.

I did try doing it like that, the difficulty is that the hard edge coincides with that point where both blade edges and the flat of the blade come together, so it's a really akward area to get clean fillets on

I managed to wrangle something I am calling good enough by using a middle curve to help fine tune the transition. Making sure all the the curves had the same number of points also helped keep the surface more even. I willl likely end up taking it into ZBrush to detail anyway, so I can smooth it out more there.

pior

Well - the only thing that matters is that it looks good enough for what you need, indeed. Just keep in mind that nothing forces you to use the CAD approach on everything.

If anything, I'd say that the one (more) important thing is to develop a workflow around a rock solid hub application that can centralize all your parts regardless on how they were done - basically Max/Maya/C4D/Blender.

Boozebeard

pior said:

Well - the only thing that matters is that it looks good enough for what you need, indeed. Just keep in mind that nothing forces you to use the CAD approach on everything.

If anything, I'd say that the one (more) important thing is to develop a workflow around a rock solid hub application that can centralize all your parts regardless on how they were done - basically Max/Maya/C4D/Blender.

For sure.Rright now I'm actively trying to learn plasticity though. Maybe at the end I will replace some bits with poly modelling if I think I can do it cleaner like that.

sacboi

There's a pro version bridge for blender, was in beta last I checked I've only tested the 30 day trial thus far (can't afford the standard sub...yet) and before it expired had tried intermittently working like mad through that weapon tute, though didn't quite get to the end. Also been fiddling about with blend's rounded edge shader since February  which imo fits neatly into utilising CAD especially for hard surface content, whether explicitly modeling either a high or low cage as well plus add on-Zen BBQ comes in handy if variable radius bevels are required, instead of applying multiple materials to output those nice edge highlights, we all like.

Yeah lol, had realised what I'd typed so knew someone would pick up on that, this is a thread about learning after-all and by the looks of things assessing that latest pic, proficiency has chipped along at pace - Nice.