Thank you guys for all solutions that you posted here. Can you send me step by step guide, that will help me a lot, because as I see all of you work in 3ds Max and I am Maya user. Thank you for your time to spend to find right solution for this problem.
This is not exactly what I need. All 3 beveled corners has same width and I need something as was posted Wirrexx:, where front side beveled corner has width 3 times bigger as is on image.
This is not exactly what I need. All 3 beveled corners has same width and I need something as was posted Wirrexx:, where front side beveled corner has width 3 times bigger as is on image.
Used Pernas technique on my version, but instead of cutting the edge at the same plase on all three corners, i cut the "fat" one a little bit earlier. But exaaaaaaaaaaactly the same technique as Pernish was showing on his mini tut.
speaking of medium-sized details, I avoid manually modeling a curve which consists of anything more than two or three uniformly sized quads. It's just too difficult and/or finicky to get right, and not parametric. Smooth, clean, sexy curves are so important for hard surface. Slightly nudge a single vertex and the shape falls apart. Even the max file I linked to above isn't good enough for a large, highly reflective shape. Narrow the specular highlight and rotate around the shape - the shading looks far from perfect although the curvature is very good.
@perna Yes, highly reflective sub-D surfaces have always suffered these problems. In the automotive vis/vfx industry there are still those who prefer NURBS surfaces for those reasons or dedicated post-prod, touch-up artists whose sole job might be to paint out those reflection imperfections on non-NURBS modeled assets.
Although in vfx/game asset authoring the asset will most likely(in a lot of cases) have a dulled/dirty/worn/rough finish to the shader and those reflection issues can certainly be unnoticeable.
Had a look at your file. Thanks for sharing. Clever set up. Just wondering, on your set up the chamfer widths can be procedurally widened/narrowed but, this will affect the perfection of that curve and as you quite rightly said, that one vert can throw the whole curve off. Or maybe I missed something in your file. Secondly, out of curiosity, any reason that you use Meshsmooth over Opensubdiv?
@petsto if you still have to ask that after all these posts then that is indeed a sorry state of affairs for your modeling progression. This thread is a wealth of tips/tricks/advice, and great examples of little problems/puzzles for you to solve. Looking for 'click this, cick that' hand-holding is a waste of time if you really want to get better and get your brain activated. You should be able to look at any of the examples posted and recreate them by putting the time into solving/reverse engineering it yourself. Even if it takes you a week to figure out how to model the example above it's time much better spent than 30min of being walked through the solution without really having to activate your brain.
As we are talking about booleans, is there any good way of reducing the amount of manual work of setting control loops?
I mean, you can have way less manual work (or none) with marius' quad chamfer script, but what do you do if you don't have it? Max quad chamfer can sometimes help, but most of the times I have to manually correct the control loops that the modifier made.
I've read here on polycount something about using one refference mesh with a push modifier with the "intersection" option on in the probooleans modifier, yet when you do that it actually converts all your operands to intersection as well, so I guess this doesn't work.
Not trying to be lazy, just trying to see if I've overlooked some max functionality that does a good job on this kind of stuff. What I normally do is plan my topology before doing the booleans stuff so it will already have those support loops or it will be easier to set them, but that does involve quite a good amount of manual work.
When you say it collapses to epoly and not emesh, could you elaborate on the impact that has for you, if any? Does it affect your workflow to use collapse to versus convert to?
The only edge case I can see off the top of my head is if you had modifiers above turbosmooth and wanted to collapse it. In that case I would simply cut the relevant modifiers, convert to poly, and paste them back on.
On the OpenSubdiv note I have found one single shape as of late that was easier for me to do with it (before I got glorious quadchamfer):
That said I have all but abandoned OSD as resetting edge weights every time you make a change gets tiresome. Now if there was a tool somewhere between QC and OSD, where you can set absolute chamfer widths QC style, but do it all in one go like OSD, I'd have a hot dollar for that.
I'd be quite interested in learning more about this virtual stack, if it's something available to get. I have seen similar addons from studios but don't have anything for personal use.
Fair point on the click counts. I tested and it is a good bit faster. Cheers!
Perhaps I should, but generally speaking I've never worried too much over counting button presses, learning/customizing tons of hotkeys, or highly customizing my programs. I've just gotten quite fast with what's there and find the mouse to be much more comfortable on my hands. Core editable poly tools and such I'll usually do with hotkeys but that's about the extent of it.
Great notes! It's been like a decade since I've touched maxscript but I'll give it a go
Unfortunately I'm the only artist at my company right now (and was the best when there were others), so my daily access to that sort of talent is eh... limited at the moment. And boy do I have horror stories to tell over a beer. My current work is endless, mindless CAD to low poly and it's slowly killing me. It's time to move on up.
Hey guys, I wonder if there is another way of modeling this. Right now there are also inner faces on those sides, but I wonder if I could make topology better. Its a bit of a tricky part for me.
Posting link so you can enlarger the image if needed.
split it up, if that's the building and roof. Roof are made of one part (and even that is split up in many) . Honestly i have no idea what part you are trying to model....
If you don't have other references, get them. I can tell from this image though that it's definitely made of many different parts. Model it how it is actually built in real life, brick by brick with shingles and trims and all. Not as one solid piece. The low poly will look similar to what you have now.
@perna thanks a lot for the file, surely nice to see how this works. Again, never thought of using two probooleans, and using a refference and one instance for controlling the operands. Really nice trick haha. I still don't know if this wouldn't get "chaotic" as soon as the operands increase in number but that's something nice to try.
The one on the right is "easier" but I guess I would have to extrude the shapes after doing those operations...
Didn't know that they updated max quadchamfer on 2018. I was actually avoiding 2018 because people were oftenly saying that it was buggy (even thought I actually heard that they focused on fixing 2017's bugs). I will give it a try at home.
I am asking about the part that I have shown to you. That castle wall thing with 8 segments. Right now, enclosing the sides of them creates a lot faces which are not visible on model. However, adding loops just complicates the model too much. Therefore I asked if there is another way or how would you model it...
Hi, I'm trying to recreate the quad sphere with flat sides (all the way back from pg. 20 of this thread, lol), but I can't seem to scale the secondary cube in order to avoid tris. For the quad sphere, I'm using a 4x4x4 cube with Spherify > Turbosmooth (1 iteration) > Spherify applied, which I believe is as round a sphere as it can get at that resolution.
I tried deleting the last Spherify modifier, but it hardly changed the topology. You mentioned your method requires zero cleanup, so I'm curious how you created your quad sphere.
@perna Awesome, thanks a bunch for the help. It's a no-go for my original quad sphere since scaling the cube down as small as possible still results in tris. I tried the stack you suggested with various Relax values, but it still results in an imperfect sphere and tris. It's probably because I'm unaware of the magic values/combination of modifers.
I saw the script page and the subdiv 1 sphere immediately reminded me of ZBrush, so I created a perfect quad sphere in there and exported an .obj to Max. With Turbosmooth on it, it seems to give the same results as yours.
The only question I have left is how you scaled the ProBoolean cube down to line up perfectly with the quad sphere's vertices. I did this by selecting each face and vertex-snapping to the respective vertices around the poles. It's fast enough, but is there a way to do this faster?
Let's flip the question around: Why do you prefer OpenSubDiv? In my experience it has been very buggy and unreliable.
@perna Just habit, as well, I suppose. Based on a few factors:
When Turbosmooth was first introduced we all had shit ram and it was its namesake over MS. When OpenSD came along I was creating a lot of offline rendertime sub-div models at the time and the old problem of linear Vs smooth UVs in Max was better (somewhat)solved with OpenSD. I have had it added to my custom modifier stack since then. Also, the fact that OpenSD defaults to isoline display and collapses to Epoly.(although I have collapse to Epoly hotkeyed so not as much of an annoyance)
Hello technical polycounters, first time asking for help, could you point me in the right direction in modeling this one? It's giving me an headache...
Hello technical polycounters, first time asking for help, could you point me in the right direction in modeling this one? It's giving me an headache...
what do you expect people to do with this request?
Whats your take on it so far?
To me it looks like a bunch of primitives and some additive/subtractive bools to get the basic shape.
Just asking for a hint in the right direction, like what technique you would use to approach it. How exactly would you go at it with basic booleans? What after the basic shape? I find the main piece that goes from cube to circle easy to obtain with subd, but then I'm lost as how to add the side cylinder.
Now after an hour or two of headaches I'm managing some basic results using modo mesh fusion...
I've got a quick question, glancing over the responses in the thread I see people saying that pentagons, and 8 sided faces are useful for this model, I'm more of a character modeller so I'm not really educated in advanced object modelling, but I thought pretty much any type of ngon was bad, maybe someone can shed some light on this for me?
I've got a quick question, glancing over the responses in the thread I see people saying that pentagons, and 8 sided faces are useful for this model, I'm more of a character modeller so I'm not really educated in advanced object modelling, but I thought pretty much any type of ngon was bad, maybe someone can shed some light on this for me?
Why did you think so?
There are cases where Ngons or tris are bad, there are cases where they are good. It all depends on the context.
@Klawd , block it out first, without worrying about subd.
The main shape here is a circle-to-square transition, a curved cutout from that, and then the simple extrusions. That's a very structured, clean process. Your modo result, however, indicates that you do not see the underlying structure and instead interpret the whole thing as small, discrete shapes, leading to a blobby, hand-tweaked result.
In order to figure out the construction, imagine what the largest shape would be if you removed extrusions and cutouts, and then just reverse that process.
Give that a shot, and if there's still struggle I'm sure someone will help out with more concrete advice.
Thanks @perna I can see the wisdom in the advice, but still I struggle in imagining it as a whole piece, escpecially because of the right side. Its asymmetry is what makes it difficult for me. The extrusion on top that seems simple has the two sides also asymmetrical complicating things. Anyway, I managed this with modo mesh fusion and although not perfect it's close enough and will do for the model I'm working on:
I've got a quick question, glancing over the responses in the thread I see people saying that pentagons, and 8 sided faces are useful for this model, I'm more of a character modeller so I'm not really educated in advanced object modelling, but I thought pretty much any type of ngon was bad, maybe someone can shed some light on this for me?
Someday.....someday soon this myth might just be dispelled once and for all.
This is something that has been misunderstood by so many people for so many years. Yes, quads can be predictable. Quads can be nice. Quads can make your life easier. But, ngons can be nice too. 6+ valence poles.....not nice.
As for hard-surface modeling. I don't build without n-gons.
Here's an example of a very old(2003) Steven Stahlberg topology. See? Nice n-gons.
@perna I blame shitty 'CG colleges' and their ignorant 'professors' I never went to college for this stuff myself but the amount of emails/PMs I get from people learning telling me 'well, my lecturer said this......' Pure bullshit. And then that gospel spreads.
As well as obviously self-experimentation (which is the best learning) we can also rely on our trusty 'times tables'......3x4=12....5x4=20...6×4=24....7×4=28......and on it goes....the theory of subdividing a non-quad face.
@perna I blame shitty 'CG colleges' and their ignorant 'professors' I never went to college for this stuff myself but the amount of emails/PMs I get from people learning telling me 'well, my lecturer said this......' Pure bullshit. And then that gospel spreads.
I think when it comes to professors, there's always a half story being retold by a student.
When I was in school, modeling was often taught by the professor doing a real time demo. Or for teachers who did come from the industry, they personally showed us their models they had made for games/movies. There was nothing wrong with us asking questions or inquiring about the process.
I think when students take certain things for gospel, they themselves are not thinking about their own work. If I ever felt something was suspect, I actually hopped on Polycount during class and would cross examine course material with that of what I found on here.
On topic: I like that hand by Stalhberg. I want to box model something just like it for my game.
I have a chamfered edge and 2 intersecting grid lines, which forms a triangle shape.
If I now want to add an actual triangle polygon there. Besides extruding the edge to the grid node, and cut out the extra part. What other faster option do I have?
@bitinn since it's on the grid, you can add an edge to the middle of your bevel and snap it to the grid if i understand you correctly. Then use Connect on the previous two.
Replies
Although in vfx/game asset authoring the asset will most likely(in a lot of cases) have a dulled/dirty/worn/rough finish to the shader and those reflection issues can certainly be unnoticeable.
Had a look at your file. Thanks for sharing. Clever set up.
@petsto if you still have to ask that after all these posts then that is indeed a sorry state of affairs for your modeling progression. This thread is a wealth of tips/tricks/advice, and great examples of little problems/puzzles for you to solve. Looking for 'click this, cick that' hand-holding is a waste of time if you really want to get better and get your brain activated. You should be able to look at any of the examples posted and recreate them by putting the time into solving/reverse engineering it yourself. Even if it takes you a week to figure out how to model the example above it's time much better spent than 30min of being walked through the solution without really having to activate your brain.
I mean, you can have way less manual work (or none) with marius' quad chamfer script, but what do you do if you don't have it? Max quad chamfer can sometimes help, but most of the times I have to manually correct the control loops that the modifier made.
I've read here on polycount something about using one refference mesh with a push modifier with the "intersection" option on in the probooleans modifier, yet when you do that it actually converts all your operands to intersection as well, so I guess this doesn't work.
Not trying to be lazy, just trying to see if I've overlooked some max functionality that does a good job on this kind of stuff. What I normally do is plan my topology before doing the booleans stuff so it will already have those support loops or it will be easier to set them, but that does involve quite a good amount of manual work.
Fair point on the click counts. I tested and it is a good bit faster. Cheers!
Perhaps I should, but generally speaking I've never worried too much over counting button presses, learning/customizing tons of hotkeys, or highly customizing my programs. I've just gotten quite fast with what's there and find the mouse to be much more comfortable on my hands. Core editable poly tools and such I'll usually do with hotkeys but that's about the extent of it.
Unfortunately I'm the only artist at my company right now (and was the best when there were others), so my daily access to that sort of talent is eh... limited at the moment. And boy do I have horror stories to tell over a beer. My current work is endless, mindless CAD to low poly and it's slowly killing me. It's time to move on up.
Poor cat.
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/10881821.jpg
Posting link so you can enlarger the image if needed.
If you don't have other references, get them. I can tell from this image though that it's definitely made of many different parts. Model it how it is actually built in real life, brick by brick with shingles and trims and all. Not as one solid piece. The low poly will look similar to what you have now.
how can i model the best these little square details on this nearly round shape?:
displacement map it if you ~really~ need the geo
The one on the right is "easier" but I guess I would have to extrude the shapes after doing those operations...
Didn't know that they updated max quadchamfer on 2018. I was actually avoiding 2018 because people were oftenly saying that it was buggy (even thought I actually heard that they focused on fixing 2017's bugs). I will give it a try at home.
Thanks for the info.
hope it helps
@perna
I am asking about the part that I have shown to you. That castle wall thing with 8 segments. Right now, enclosing the sides of them creates a lot faces which are not visible on model. However, adding loops just complicates the model too much. Therefore I asked if there is another way or how would you model it...
Hi, I'm trying to recreate the quad sphere with flat sides (all the way back from pg. 20 of this thread, lol), but I can't seem to scale the secondary cube in order to avoid tris. For the quad sphere, I'm using a 4x4x4 cube with Spherify > Turbosmooth (1 iteration) > Spherify applied, which I believe is as round a sphere as it can get at that resolution.
I tried deleting the last Spherify modifier, but it hardly changed the topology. You mentioned your method requires zero cleanup, so I'm curious how you created your quad sphere.
I saw the script page and the subdiv 1 sphere immediately reminded me of ZBrush, so I created a perfect quad sphere in there and exported an .obj to Max. With Turbosmooth on it, it seems to give the same results as yours.
The only question I have left is how you scaled the ProBoolean cube down to line up perfectly with the quad sphere's vertices. I did this by selecting each face and vertex-snapping to the respective vertices around the poles. It's fast enough, but is there a way to do this faster?
When Turbosmooth was first introduced we all had shit ram and it was its namesake over MS. When OpenSD came along I was creating a lot of offline rendertime sub-div models at the time and the old problem of linear Vs smooth UVs in Max was better (somewhat)solved with OpenSD. I have had it added to my custom modifier stack since then. Also, the fact that OpenSD defaults to isoline display and collapses to Epoly.(although I have collapse to Epoly hotkeyed so not as much of an annoyance)
should i change the topology or try a diferent aproach?
what will be your process to make that in maya?
Help me please with this shapes
[spoiler]
[/spoiler]
first time asking for help, could you point me in the right direction in modeling this one? It's giving me an headache...
Whats your take on it so far?
To me it looks like a bunch of primitives and some additive/subtractive bools to get the basic shape.
Now after an hour or two of headaches I'm managing some basic results using modo mesh fusion...
There are cases where Ngons or tris are bad, there are cases where they are good. It all depends on the context.
Anyway, I managed this with modo mesh fusion and although not perfect it's close enough and will do for the model I'm working on:
This is something that has been misunderstood by so many people for so many years. Yes, quads can be predictable. Quads can be nice. Quads can make your life easier. But, ngons can be nice too. 6+ valence poles.....not nice.
As for hard-surface modeling. I don't build without n-gons.
Here's an example of a very old(2003) Steven Stahlberg topology. See? Nice n-gons.
As well as obviously self-experimentation (which is the best learning) we can also rely on our trusty 'times tables'......3x4=12....5x4=20...6×4=24....7×4=28......and on it goes....the theory of subdividing a non-quad face.
That's called procrastination
When I was in school, modeling was often taught by the professor doing a real time demo. Or for teachers who did come from the industry, they personally showed us their models they had made for games/movies. There was nothing wrong with us asking questions or inquiring about the process.
I think when students take certain things for gospel, they themselves are not thinking about their own work. If I ever felt something was suspect, I actually hopped on Polycount during class and would cross examine course material with that of what I found on here.
On topic: I like that hand by Stalhberg. I want to box model something just like it for my game.
I have a chamfered edge and 2 intersecting grid lines, which forms a triangle shape.
If I now want to add an actual triangle polygon there. Besides extruding the edge to the grid node, and cut out the extra part. What other faster option do I have?
Can I add edges along the grid line?
(Edit: I am using Maya 2017)