Sorry, should have been a little more explanatory. Fastest way is to select the code between the parentheses and drag it to a toolbar in Max to make a button. You can right click on the new button and select "Edit Button Appearance..." to label it, give it a tool tip, etc. Then just select some objects and click the button to assign the wire color and material to them. You can assign a hotkey to it as well from the Customize > Customize User Interface... menu. It will be in the DragAndDrop Category as Macro##. I'm a noob at Maxscript, so there are definitely more elegant ways to do this.
Understood. I thought it may have been a bad a approach since Jets are cylindrical and your not supposed to move verts on cylinders, or make them yourself from planes.
Have started a Rafale jet but so far every approach I've taken to these vents and how they merge into the main fuselage has left me with really messy GEO
Have the whole blockout done with plane extrusion, just having a hard time getting the shape of the cockpit glass just right.
Understood. I thought it may have been a bad a approach since Jets are cylindrical and your not supposed to move verts on cylinders, or make them yourself from planes.
This is just a rough blockout. You're obviously need more effort than mine to achieve more precise result. manual vertex pulling, keep each flow a smooth curve, align it to your body etc & now that i look at the ref pics again, it's actually more rounded from the front view lol
Understood. I thought it may have been a bad a approach since Jets are cylindrical and your not supposed to move verts on cylinders, or make them yourself from planes.
"Not supposed to move verts on cylinders"? Where did you hear THAT one?
"Not supposed to move verts on cylinders"? Where did you hear THAT one?
If you're making a round cylindrical object, and being round and precise is a concern, you shouldn't be manually tweaking the shape of the cylinder.
If you're creating a cylindrical shape, start from a cylinder, not a box or a plane or anything else you need to "model into" a cylinder, just start from a cylinder.
Too often you see people trying to "box model" cylinders and round shapes, or manually tweak cylinders to the point where they loose the correct form, and its just a mess.
I think this is what he was getting at, and I feel like the person who told him this was me, so, likely good advice if perhaps misquoted. =P
Not sure how much it applies to the Jets posted here, as both of them have more complex shapes than simply being cylindrical.
I never noticed that the teapot has floating geometry all over the place. You should render them again and make a challenge for the Dono 2011 reel. http://vimeo.com/19368587
As for planes and stuff, I'm building a few racecars and a PAK-50 Russian jet, and I've found the best way is to grab some poly planes and follow the metal plates. Polygons are a lot easier to bend and twist than metal and carbon fiber weave (avoid like the plague), so you'll always have an advantage. Then once that's done, either weld them up and go from there, or use your new, accurate panel-based shape as a much more detailed reference, you should know where you need loops and so on and so forth.
sneakymcfox : can you post a screenshot of your mesh progress so far so we can understand more which part you are having trouble with. Since judging only by your statement.. if you only just want to connect the vents to main body, a simple bridge will do just fine.
What I eventually settled On for the geo around the vent, It wasn't quite as complicated as i thought it would be and it's all quads but some of the geometry is very ugly still but it seems to look alright turbosmoothed
Please ignore the overlapping geo on the vent, was just about to fix that.Can give you the OBJ as it is sort of hard to see in there :P
I'm tripping over my own mouse clicks trying to get this piece to look like it belongs on an aircraft. How can I get the tail-piece to have a better curve, yet hard edges where necessary, while balancing edge flow where the body begins and carrying extra geometry to the body so it can have a softer curve. Should they be two pieces?
Concept:
Model:
Way to much uneeded control loops atm, it's only giving you a hard time on tweaking it.. BLUE is one of many of that uneeded loops.. remove it, i bet it looks much better when turbosmoothed.
RED is how you're supposed to model it from the very beginning. perfectly straight or perfect curve. You can use spline as a guide in your 3d modeling program. Or if you're using polyboost/graphite tools there's Curve tools to help.
Don't worry about adding reinforcement edge/small details until you nail the general shape of it. You don't even need X because it's only just make your tweaking harder.. add the extrusion later after you satisfied with the general shape.
But if you don't really care about precision that much and all you needed to know is how the correct topology on area between the main body and the vents.. there.. ORANGE.
I also like to post on my 3D blog workflow stuff I do for future reference...I just want to stress to people how blocking out my model has made life much easier!
PS: I am in no way trying to tutor anyone. I am a noob to subdivision modeling too so I am merely just posting what I have learnt/found useful.
Here is how I do wraps, probably not the best way, and is a bit of a cheat as it doesn't truly wrap around, but here is what I do (and this is in zbrush, not maya, so might be totally useless)
I have a really nooby question. How do you end these kinds of support edges on cylinders, and not get the pinching as shown? I'm sure there is just something I am missing, but it's a problem a run into frequently >:(
Perna: Wow thanks for the in depth response! I have to admit I haven't done half the reading up on Sub D modeling that I should have, and will be thoroughly going through this thread this weekend. Your explanation makes sense and I'll be keeping all that in mind
Nah, keep it as an example. My hard-surface workflow is usually to quickly brute-force the surface and then remesh it for a sculpt, so extra faces are never a concern for me as the skin ends up with a lot anyway. It's certainly not the best technique for a traditional/sub-d approach though, just something that gets the job done (like duct-taping compared to your proper fixes), so if you ever have better solutions like what you posted, then by all means cut in and set things straight. It's how we all learn. :thumbup:
I just read my post again, didn't intend to sound an asshole, happens when I'm in a rush, could have made some points in a more neutral way, hehe
From an outside perspective its fine.
When me and Joe started saying "more polies", that's not what we meant. I kind of regret that whole thing now because we see a lot of people who apply the idea poorly, going way beyond our intentions, using insane amounts of geometry where other solutions would have worked far better.
No reason to regret it, in a way its a necessity. It eventually (I would suspect anyway) forces the evolution of modelling theory within a persons own mind. At some point people will want a better work through than dealing with 92140980124^209123 polygons and will start searching for the answers causing them to dwell on the ideas of "more geo" and exactly what it means.
Peices of the puzzle.
Like the 1911 slide I posted ans an answer several pages back 96 sides on a cylinder is completely ridiculous and no one in their right mind would want to work with that, so while its a solution my hope was that someone would take that example and see that it wasn't the literal answer.
Like the 1911 slide I posted ans an answer several pages back 96 sides on a cylinder is completely ridiculous and no one in their right mind would want to work with that, so while its a solution my hope was that someone would take that example and see that it wasn't the literal answer.
I'll be honest here; 48+ sided cylinders that remain as cylinders do not strike me as something that would be hard or ridiculous to work with. With a shape like the above, I don't think even 96 sides would make life any harder. Different, more complex shapes are a completely different story of course, and it may also depend on what you had planned on doing with the geo (as I know some people like to just try and remove control loops to create their low poly). But for me, if I don't think something is going to slow me down or come back to bite me in the ass somewhere else in the shape, I don't rule it out.
You assume that the cylinder will stay a primitive and won't have detail added to it or won't intersect with other geo. What happens when you're asked to add sci-fi greeble extrusion to the cylinder after the fact?
Indeed, sorry if I wasn't clear on that, but its what I meant with "cylinders that remain as cylinders" and "Different, more complex shapes are a completely different story of course" though. Trust me, I'm still counting your solution as a better, more versatile option. I'm just stating, in the effort of being honest and explaining the way I currently see things, that there are some shapes where having more geo isn't going to mean that my work is cut out for me; that the process of adding, selecting, and moving new loops would still be the same process regardless of how many sides.
PICTURE 2 is the result I am looking for. PICTURE 1 is what I got. This is wat I do:
I create a line (the red line in picture 1) and use it as a guide
I move all vertices horizontally till they match up with the red line. I zoom in, match up again, zoom in, match up again,... So I do this MANUALLY.
Yesterday I thought: "Why not use the Snap-tool?" Indeed! Good idea! But I have a problem. I set the snap-tool to 'edge' (Max 2011) so it would snap with the red line. And it does snap as long as I move the vertices over the X/Y-axis at the same time! But I don't want to affect the Y-position of my vertices. I only want to move over the X-asis. But when I try that, it DOESN't snap correctly and I still have to adjust it manually. Anyone knows a solution for this?
theres a tool called straighten loop in the graphite toolset. it will do that job in 1 click
Cool! Thx! I even disabled those graphite toolset, thought it was just a 'visual duplicate' of common Max-tools. lol
'Straighten loop' does the job for me! Is there a way to choose the 'slope' of that edge-loop? So I can adjust it without changing the Y-position of my vertices? Or do I just have to put my vertices in the right position 'more or less' before pressing 'straighten loop'?
I know for some of you 'THIS' problem is a silly thing to ask, but I am stuck right now and need your help here. Take a look at the pictures and the OBJ file.
I need to connect these two objects. I know that I do have too many edges on the inner object but as soon as I add more edges to the ball I get sharp edges on the ball and loose my curvature on that thing, which I have to avoid. Thing is, that the ball shape is fixed, meaning I had to construct it first to get it exactly like the customer wanted it and now I have to add the box like shape to it without changing the ball shape.
How would you guys connect these elements using just quads without changing the curvature of the ball? Any help is greatly appreciated!
I would start over with a higher tessellation (and more square quads) sphere. the higher tessellations are mostly so that yellow edge is in the sphere- dont just add that one edge in. I attached an image to show you how to deal with the corners.
Also floating geo would work well for this.
aaww all i've learnt from polycount was wroooong :poly144: You're destroying ma repairs
Quili, can't u just use floating geometry ? Keep the ball intact, then just put the square shape above, moving points around so it matches the ball curvature ?
The left side of the bottom image is what I'm aiming for.
Although it does seem like there's still some pinching (probably sorted out once I space the verts correctly).
I suppose I was just wondering if there was a better way to do it. I'm pretty new to sub-D modelling and am sort of wondering whether to continue to try and make something straight of the bat and learn as I go or to do a tutorial like Eat3D's dozer.
Wesley, your first attempt is pretty good, just remember you (usually) need edges on both sides of a corner to retain the shape. But your supporting edges are way skewed, I can see some shading happening between them and the border. Most of the time, they should be totally planar, or else you get pinching like that. I'd remove them and add new loops, if you need to tweak them afterwards, slide the verts along their edges to keep them flat.
Oniram: You're very quiet. It could be this computer, but the video compression made watching anything you're doing difficult.
Hello I was wondering if anyone knew how I could do the spiral around the handle of this hammer? I thought about Extruding around a curve, but I was going to see if anyone might know of a different method ??
@tehrobster2
Someone posted this plane-shift + Bend method before, just use a FFD to get the grips shape and then "Create Shape" from the edges to get that Wire Wrapping.
Replies
Sorry, should have been a little more explanatory. Fastest way is to select the code between the parentheses and drag it to a toolbar in Max to make a button. You can right click on the new button and select "Edit Button Appearance..." to label it, give it a tool tip, etc. Then just select some objects and click the button to assign the wire color and material to them. You can assign a hotkey to it as well from the Customize > Customize User Interface... menu. It will be in the DragAndDrop Category as Macro##. I'm a noob at Maxscript, so there are definitely more elegant ways to do this.
Understood. I thought it may have been a bad a approach since Jets are cylindrical and your not supposed to move verts on cylinders, or make them yourself from planes.
The intakes:
What they Look like with the rest of the plane:
This is just a rough blockout. You're obviously need more effort than mine to achieve more precise result. manual vertex pulling, keep each flow a smooth curve, align it to your body etc & now that i look at the ref pics again, it's actually more rounded from the front view lol
"Not supposed to move verts on cylinders"? Where did you hear THAT one?
That sounds like something one of my teachers would say...hmmm...
One of my teachers said 'always model from primitive objects'.
So I have ever since.
http://img41.imageshack.us/img41/9397/charconcept1.jpg
http://img841.imageshack.us/img841/6429/porsch.jpg
Always listen to your teachers.
Edit: And a teapot is not really a primitive object btw.
If you're making a round cylindrical object, and being round and precise is a concern, you shouldn't be manually tweaking the shape of the cylinder.
If you're creating a cylindrical shape, start from a cylinder, not a box or a plane or anything else you need to "model into" a cylinder, just start from a cylinder.
Too often you see people trying to "box model" cylinders and round shapes, or manually tweak cylinders to the point where they loose the correct form, and its just a mess.
I think this is what he was getting at, and I feel like the person who told him this was me, so, likely good advice if perhaps misquoted. =P
Not sure how much it applies to the Jets posted here, as both of them have more complex shapes than simply being cylindrical.
Of course it was a joke refering to MAX's standard primitives.
As for planes and stuff, I'm building a few racecars and a PAK-50 Russian jet, and I've found the best way is to grab some poly planes and follow the metal plates. Polygons are a lot easier to bend and twist than metal and carbon fiber weave (avoid like the plague), so you'll always have an advantage. Then once that's done, either weld them up and go from there, or use your new, accurate panel-based shape as a much more detailed reference, you should know where you need loops and so on and so forth.
/end of discussion
sneakymcfox : can you post a screenshot of your mesh progress so far so we can understand more which part you are having trouble with. Since judging only by your statement.. if you only just want to connect the vents to main body, a simple bridge will do just fine.
Please ignore the overlapping geo on the vent, was just about to fix that.Can give you the OBJ as it is sort of hard to see in there :P
Concept:
Model:
RED is how you're supposed to model it from the very beginning. perfectly straight or perfect curve. You can use spline as a guide in your 3d modeling program. Or if you're using polyboost/graphite tools there's Curve tools to help.
Don't worry about adding reinforcement edge/small details until you nail the general shape of it. You don't even need X because it's only just make your tweaking harder.. add the extrusion later after you satisfied with the general shape.
But if you don't really care about precision that much
THAT'S how a good sub-d workflow should be like.
I'm having problems in modeling an arm bandage in Maya.
I've tried using curves and extrudind, but the object randomly twists:(.
Is there another way to do bandages?
Example:
Thanks so much for your help! I'm a very visual person and I was able to pop this out in minutes thanks to your image. So grateful!
Edit:I used 48 sides here, more would be even better,
luke: When I try that I get weird pinching :S Will try the geo way and if not give this another whack.
Thank you a lot! It was very useful:)
From an outside perspective its fine.
No reason to regret it, in a way its a necessity. It eventually (I would suspect anyway) forces the evolution of modelling theory within a persons own mind. At some point people will want a better work through than dealing with 92140980124^209123 polygons and will start searching for the answers causing them to dwell on the ideas of "more geo" and exactly what it means.
Peices of the puzzle.
Like the 1911 slide I posted ans an answer several pages back 96 sides on a cylinder is completely ridiculous and no one in their right mind would want to work with that, so while its a solution my hope was that someone would take that example and see that it wasn't the literal answer.
PICTURE 2 is the result I am looking for. PICTURE 1 is what I got. This is wat I do:
- I create a line (the red line in picture 1) and use it as a guide
- I move all vertices horizontally till they match up with the red line. I zoom in, match up again, zoom in, match up again,... So I do this MANUALLY.
Yesterday I thought: "Why not use the Snap-tool?" Indeed! Good idea! But I have a problem. I set the snap-tool to 'edge' (Max 2011) so it would snap with the red line. And it does snap as long as I move the vertices over the X/Y-axis at the same time! But I don't want to affect the Y-position of my vertices. I only want to move over the X-asis. But when I try that, it DOESN't snap correctly and I still have to adjust it manually. Anyone knows a solution for this?EDIT
Also, i believe there is a script on scriptspot aswell.....
Cool! Thx! I even disabled those graphite toolset, thought it was just a 'visual duplicate' of common Max-tools. lol
'Straighten loop' does the job for me! Is there a way to choose the 'slope' of that edge-loop? So I can adjust it without changing the Y-position of my vertices? Or do I just have to put my vertices in the right position 'more or less' before pressing 'straighten loop'?
For easy shapes like that you could also use Slice Plane, place it how you want it, click slice and delete the unwanted part.
I know for some of you 'THIS' problem is a silly thing to ask, but I am stuck right now and need your help here. Take a look at the pictures and the OBJ file.
Hard_Soft_Edge_Connect.lxo
I need to connect these two objects. I know that I do have too many edges on the inner object but as soon as I add more edges to the ball I get sharp edges on the ball and loose my curvature on that thing, which I have to avoid. Thing is, that the ball shape is fixed, meaning I had to construct it first to get it exactly like the customer wanted it and now I have to add the box like shape to it without changing the ball shape.
How would you guys connect these elements using just quads without changing the curvature of the ball? Any help is greatly appreciated!
Cheers from France
Also floating geo would work well for this.
I have this shape:
I thought this would be best.
But it gave me this:
So I tried... (only the one on the left)
Which gave me...
Is that right? Or did I miss a better way?
aaww all i've learnt from polycount was wroooong :poly144: You're destroying ma repairs
Quili, can't u just use floating geometry ? Keep the ball intact, then just put the square shape above, moving points around so it matches the ball curvature ?
Wesley, what is the final shape you want ?
Although it does seem like there's still some pinching (probably sorted out once I space the verts correctly).
I suppose I was just wondering if there was a better way to do it. I'm pretty new to sub-D modelling and am sort of wondering whether to continue to try and make something straight of the bat and learn as I go or to do a tutorial like Eat3D's dozer.
[ame]
Oniram: You're very quiet. It could be this computer, but the video compression made watching anything you're doing difficult.
Before you posted I came up with this, which seemed messy.
But gave me a good result.
Someone posted this plane-shift + Bend method before, just use a FFD to get the grips shape and then "Create Shape" from the edges to get that Wire Wrapping.