Allright, here's another problem I just couldn't solve and tried figuring out different methods that wouldn't work, due to this thing having planes at different angles and some edges not being able to remove themselves, but I did manage to fix the pinching on this real well.
Everything looks great on this "bolt" but then, I get this nasty bump coming out that you can see, and it's not supposed to do, instead it needs to round off perfectly. I know what's causing the bump, just need the solution to get rid of those pesky edges that create it. Viewport with grey mat and wireframe shown here if anyone can help me remove that dumb bump!
ZacD This is probably the solution you could go for...
It's not perfect but really it doesn't have to be meshsmoothable, for instance you could make a cylinder with loads of edges, boolean out what you dont need and chamfer it a bit. Might be easier that way with some stuff?
ps: G3L the same sort of thing applies to your model but you could go about it differently, just experiment a bit and it will come
G3L : to avoid that kind of bumps around a cylindrical shape, you really just need to go much more dense with the base volume. Try maybe 24 edges. The more edges you have defining the primitive, the less it will deform near areas of chanfered, double-edged details...
Lame, so there's no way to go from max to xsi without that happening? its Its hard to see how the smoothing affects the object with all the extra tris, and its tedious trying to remove them all
bitmap: That looks great! Please do a tutorial on your process for that floater. It seems like it would be difficult to get things to line up properly, but I'm sure you have a good way of doing it.
Perna, bitmap: I'm still not sure what you guys are talking about. I'm a 3ds max user which is probably why. Is this a method only possible with Modo, or would aligning the verts on the edge to another sub-d surface (using polyboost tools) give me essentially the same results?
himadri_sm: Someone on polycount will likely have a better way, but here is what I would do:
The brown piece itself would obviously be a floater.
I would make a cylinder (with a lot of sides), scale the one face down like in the picture.(this would be the major round part)
Then make a smaller cylinder and attach it (this would be the part with the screw on it).
If you need to get the little details around the screw and the screw itself, those can simply be floaters. I think as long as you use a lot of sides on the cylinders, when you attach the two, it should smooth nicely.
Oh, and of course add your supporting edges for sub-d.
Good luck!
-spends absolute ages trying to get some clever lowpoly cage thing going before you give up and use more segments anyway.
A less dense mesh like the one in CGMP's screenshot will end up with inaccurate curves, inconsistent widths, poor shading, etc and be hard to edit manually.
Strange you say that, curves, widths and shading look fine to me plus it didn't take that long to produce. Wouldn't you say it's better to have more parts that are contiguos instead of lots of non contiguos ones? Seems that editing would be easier that way as apposed to using floating geometry in bitmaps example which doesn't give a perfect edge, (downloaded the file & checked) this method wouldn't translate seamlessly in a normal map.
btw I did mention using a higher poly primitive to begin with like pior mentioned afterwards
Yes, the effects of subdivision have been witnessed but the application is something we have to experiment with. Predicting the best solution to an unfamiliar problem seems difficult, sometimes impossible.
The response to ZacD's reply in keeping smooth edges was interpreted as wanting a contiguous surface that could be subdivided smoothly, hence the solution presented.
The reference to floaters was primarily concerned with bitmaps suggestion where the join between two mesh elements was imperfect. Using a contiguous modified primitive would circumvent this problem and be more controllable, providing the complexity was low! The secondary concern was the guitar part as this could be approached using up to three parts with subdivision or four parts without.
It's interesting seeing different approaches and I think it helps seeing from someone else's perspective so that more choices are available in the future and you don't get "stuck".
With floaters, generally, if there isnt some visible problem looking at the mesh, its going to bake correctly(or well enough). Be it a floating inset screw, or a complex floating intersection, if it looks correct and seamless in your viewport, there is no reason to think it wouldn't be seamless in your bake.
As you see in bitmap's example, it looks seamless enough. You see the resulting faces end up completely planar, so there would be no "off" angle that would create a seam in the bake. Clearly if you screw this up and it looks bad in the viewport, it will also look bad in the bake. =D
Actually downloaded bitmaps file and checked it with meshsmooth up to 4 iterations and the join was noticeably imperfect from a reasonable distance. If this object is a very small proportion of the scene/mesh/texture space then I understand and agree completely that it's unimportant yet the concern was raised on the other hand.
Just to add, I used to get bogged down with small details and only until later when looking at the whole scenario did it hit that appreciating scale was one of the most important and time saving factors. edit that probably sounds like contradiction heh
Hello, i am new at modelling mechanical sub-d things, i have followed
some tutorials in this thread, but my question is what you would advise a beginner to model first ? Maybe a hammer or something else?
Ive been having trouble for awhile on one particular form of metal with seams. If you notice in the picture, the top of those plant incubators, the metal has a seam design in it.
The problem with rounded surfaces with seams like that is that when you try to get the seam to have a hard edge when smoothed it ends up pinching, in this case, the cylinder shape, and you have a hard crease in whats supposed to be a round object.
What is the best way to get seam detail into rounded or odd shaped shaped surfaces. In my case it wouldn't have to be modeled in necessarily, it would be baked down into a normal map.
Swarm22: I'd do it as floating geometry. Make a spline (nice and smooth) on top of the cylinder mesh, and use a Sweep or similar (assuming 3dsmax) to give it an indented shape.
Swarm22: I'd do it as floating geometry. Make a spline (nice and smooth) on top of the cylinder mesh, and use a Sweep or similar (assuming 3dsmax) to give it an indented shape.
I was actually about to give that a try, glad that it works. thanks man.
I do floating stuff constantly at work, it's doesn't always work perfect, but usually quite well. It mostly just takes trial and error and experience to know what will work and what won't.
I do my normal/AO/Diff bakes in multiple passes. Usually a base pass of parts with only the main shapes, then another pass of floaters with cropped alphas and 0 padding and paste those over the other mesh in Photoshop.
It usually works quite well, but like I said, it depends. I also turn off the showing of errors for my final bake on floaters to get rid of any red that might bleed.
Seems there's been an influx of people doing the cylindrical shape with indent type thing...next time instead of using an 8-sided cylinder, I'm going to go with 32, lol.
Tutorial:
1. Did a low poly version.
2. Ran connect to add some edge loops.
3. Extruded every other row of faces.
4. Ran connect again to get edge loops in place for running turbosmooth.
5. Pushed/pulled geometry.
6. Played around in the modifier stack and found tesselate gave me a good base to work with.
7. Took it into Zbrush and moved, painted folds, smoothed, etc..
8. Ran Decimation Master
9. Imported back into Max
hell mark, do you have a closer pic of the high res? It looks really muddled, can't tell if it's what I'm after.
Ultimately I'm looking for a real wrap effect like this:
It looks like maybe splines and an extrusion where used? Wondering if I'm doing something wrong though. I always end up with the damn extrusions rotating funky throughout a turn or something like that.
I just do it with a long subdivided plane, a Twist modifier to get the rough wrap shape down, a Shell modifier on top to give it some depth, and then tweak verts/edges to get a more natural look.
- Select an ring of polygons on the staff, clone it out, slide the verts to whatever angle you want, then extruded/push/whateveryoulike -- if you need a continuous mesh, just delete the polies under it and start welding.
Not quite, Ark. I'll have to try a combo of several of these techniques. The sculpting one is closest, but I have limited experience with sculpting apps, so I just need to practice more.
I can make the shape you've shown there, Ark. But the problem is how it terminates. it doesn't look like it was wrapped. There's an initial point where it had to be glued to the object, then wrapped over itself.
Using MoP's suggestion along with some sculpting tweaks should give me the result I'm looking for.
I was recently trying to do something similar (and was actually trying mimic that same pic that you were from cgtalk). I settled on a couple helix splines that I modified a bit, then used a sweep with an oblong shape, then overlayed a couple from different directions to get this:
hmm, if i were trying to do wraps around a staff, i would start cutting extra loops around the staff geo. Then i'd do an edge "ring select" and "connect" them with 2 lines and adjust the spacing so they were close to the base loops. Take these 2 new edge loops and scale them out a bit. This would essentially be one "wrap". Hope that makes sense :P.
You'd have to play with your cuts to make small areas of geo that wouldn't pop out to remain the base wood.
I'm wondering if I did this correctly? The shading looks messed up on the edges.
Try adding more loops like this (the number of loops you can add is left to you, I just drew the general idea. Also forgive the horrible paintover. :P)
That should fix it, I think. As perna says, it's hi-poly sub-d modelling, there's no reason to not add a few loops here and there for better smoothing at the expense of polys.
See how it lights up along the corner? Where it supposed to be dark. I added loops around the model but doesn't seem to be fixing it. Am I being to picky?
Naut: yeah looks fine to me as well, just add those extra loops as vcool mentioned to give that huge cylindrical shape some better shading. plus the corners are good.
I'm working on this tire and unfortunately both sides have to be a little different from each in terms of the repeating depth on the tire.
Anyways, that's not the issue...the issue is what I'm getting, and I know why I am. As you can see in this picture, I 'm not getting a nice rounded tire. Where the edges bunch up, it starts creating these wide bumps. Why? Because the divisions I made for the hard edges on the tire depth seams are affecting the overall rounded shape. I'll shutup and you can take a look...
Now before coming on here, I always try to solve the problem myself to advance myself. So I tried this one, to minimize the division going across, but now I get this weird pinching problem, that I'm sure I've never got before when I've done this method. So, tell me, should I really worry about a little pinch like that on the tire seams and go this route, or is there another solution?
BTW, the bumpiness on cylindrical objects, I've gotten it before, and I'm not talking about the problem I had recently with the post I made about a week ago. Trying to minimize these cuts sometimes becomes a problem O_o
oh man, don't mind that weird edge on the side of the tire in the 2nd pic (if you notice it)! looks like i welded those two points on accident but trust me, that's so not the problem of all this, i just noticed it! urgh...
Replies
Everything looks great on this "bolt" but then, I get this nasty bump coming out that you can see, and it's not supposed to do, instead it needs to round off perfectly. I know what's causing the bump, just need the solution to get rid of those pesky edges that create it. Viewport with grey mat and wireframe shown here if anyone can help me remove that dumb bump!
obj here...
http://www.2shared.com/file/7609759/44faf75a/Poly_high_quads.html
max file here...
http://www.2shared.com/file/7605887/57665c95/Hi_poly_part.html
ZacD This is probably the solution you could go for...
It's not perfect but really it doesn't have to be meshsmoothable, for instance you could make a cylinder with loads of edges, boolean out what you dont need and chamfer it a bit. Might be easier that way with some stuff?
ps: G3L the same sort of thing applies to your model but you could go about it differently, just experiment a bit and it will come
GCMP: zacD's problem is almost like mine! let me see what that does for me...I knew there was a way around it, just didn't really come to me.
It was all tri's when I imported it...
:poly136: why the hell did I not see that before? thanks wallasaurus!
Might do a tutorial on this shit.
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/93793/PC_Float.obj
im using the constraint to background.
i move the piece against the other piece. and it stick to the surface. kinda like a project as per said.
it's a very nice trick
The brown piece itself would obviously be a floater.
I would make a cylinder (with a lot of sides), scale the one face down like in the picture.(this would be the major round part)
Then make a smaller cylinder and attach it (this would be the part with the screw on it).
If you need to get the little details around the screw and the screw itself, those can simply be floaters. I think as long as you use a lot of sides on the cylinders, when you attach the two, it should smooth nicely.
Oh, and of course add your supporting edges for sub-d.
Good luck!
Strange you say that, curves, widths and shading look fine to me plus it didn't take that long to produce. Wouldn't you say it's better to have more parts that are contiguos instead of lots of non contiguos ones? Seems that editing would be easier that way as apposed to using floating geometry in bitmaps example which doesn't give a perfect edge, (downloaded the file & checked) this method wouldn't translate seamlessly in a normal map.
btw I did mention using a higher poly primitive to begin with like pior mentioned afterwards
The response to ZacD's reply in keeping smooth edges was interpreted as wanting a contiguous surface that could be subdivided smoothly, hence the solution presented.
The reference to floaters was primarily concerned with bitmaps suggestion where the join between two mesh elements was imperfect. Using a contiguous modified primitive would circumvent this problem and be more controllable, providing the complexity was low! The secondary concern was the guitar part as this could be approached using up to three parts with subdivision or four parts without.
It's interesting seeing different approaches and I think it helps seeing from someone else's perspective so that more choices are available in the future and you don't get "stuck".
As you see in bitmap's example, it looks seamless enough. You see the resulting faces end up completely planar, so there would be no "off" angle that would create a seam in the bake. Clearly if you screw this up and it looks bad in the viewport, it will also look bad in the bake. =D
Just to add, I used to get bogged down with small details and only until later when looking at the whole scenario did it hit that appreciating scale was one of the most important and time saving factors. edit that probably sounds like contradiction heh
some tutorials in this thread, but my question is what you would advise a beginner to model first ? Maybe a hammer or something else?
What was your first mechanical model ?
The problem with rounded surfaces with seams like that is that when you try to get the seam to have a hard edge when smoothed it ends up pinching, in this case, the cylinder shape, and you have a hard crease in whats supposed to be a round object.
What is the best way to get seam detail into rounded or odd shaped shaped surfaces. In my case it wouldn't have to be modeled in necessarily, it would be baked down into a normal map.
Thanks Guys.
I was actually about to give that a try, glad that it works. thanks man.
Example:
Not the cleanest of meshes but the end result is fine (and easily tweakable), and it only took 2 minutes to make.
I do my normal/AO/Diff bakes in multiple passes. Usually a base pass of parts with only the main shapes, then another pass of floaters with cropped alphas and 0 padding and paste those over the other mesh in Photoshop.
It usually works quite well, but like I said, it depends. I also turn off the showing of errors for my final bake on floaters to get rid of any red that might bleed.
Not sure this is what you need but here's a quick and dirty ( Hi Andy :P ) tutorial I did for the straps on the Darkwatch Gun I did.
Link to the gun http://markdamico.carbonmade.com/projects/2388306
Tutorial:
1. Did a low poly version.
2. Ran connect to add some edge loops.
3. Extruded every other row of faces.
4. Ran connect again to get edge loops in place for running turbosmooth.
5. Pushed/pulled geometry.
6. Played around in the modifier stack and found tesselate gave me a good base to work with.
7. Took it into Zbrush and moved, painted folds, smoothed, etc..
8. Ran Decimation Master
9. Imported back into Max
what's a staff?
The big thing in my pants that EQ is always fondling... :poly142:
it's a wooden stick, used for combat.
Ultimately I'm looking for a real wrap effect like this:
It looks like maybe splines and an extrusion where used? Wondering if I'm doing something wrong though. I always end up with the damn extrusions rotating funky throughout a turn or something like that.
- Select an ring of polygons on the staff, clone it out, slide the verts to whatever angle you want, then extruded/push/whateveryoulike -- if you need a continuous mesh, just delete the polies under it and start welding.
- Sculpt it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdLcHHb7Cz8 (ninjas from around here)
- What mop said
- http://boards.polycount.net/showpost.php?p=939228&postcount=400 first few steps of this + extrude
http://www.screentoaster.com/watch/stVE5UQEBIR1xdR1VcUllaUFZS/staff
I can make the shape you've shown there, Ark. But the problem is how it terminates. it doesn't look like it was wrapped. There's an initial point where it had to be glued to the object, then wrapped over itself.
Using MoP's suggestion along with some sculpting tweaks should give me the result I'm looking for.
You'd have to play with your cuts to make small areas of geo that wouldn't pop out to remain the base wood.
Try adding more loops like this (the number of loops you can add is left to you, I just drew the general idea. Also forgive the horrible paintover. :P)
That should fix it, I think. As perna says, it's hi-poly sub-d modelling, there's no reason to not add a few loops here and there for better smoothing at the expense of polys.
See how it lights up along the corner? Where it supposed to be dark. I added loops around the model but doesn't seem to be fixing it. Am I being to picky?
Anyways, that's not the issue...the issue is what I'm getting, and I know why I am. As you can see in this picture, I 'm not getting a nice rounded tire. Where the edges bunch up, it starts creating these wide bumps. Why? Because the divisions I made for the hard edges on the tire depth seams are affecting the overall rounded shape. I'll shutup and you can take a look...
Now before coming on here, I always try to solve the problem myself to advance myself. So I tried this one, to minimize the division going across, but now I get this weird pinching problem, that I'm sure I've never got before when I've done this method. So, tell me, should I really worry about a little pinch like that on the tire seams and go this route, or is there another solution?
BTW, the bumpiness on cylindrical objects, I've gotten it before, and I'm not talking about the problem I had recently with the post I made about a week ago. Trying to minimize these cuts sometimes becomes a problem O_o