WIP : steampunk Gun

SnowInChina

hi everyone

iam kind of new to all this 3D stuff and iam reading alot of tuts and posts regarding it.
along with this iam trying to get some practice and thought it would be helpfull to start a small project where iam going to do everything from modelling to baking and texturing.
and well, i thought i would pick a smaller and easier project but it turned out that i was completly wrong and somehow underestimated it a little bit.

so now iam stuck with the first half of my gun and it really doesnt look right.
i´am not so interested in getting the proportions and stuff right, more into having a good mesh, and ... well it doesnt really look like iam going anywhere

but see for yourself




it didnt look too bad (at least for me) until i put the round cap on it and merged it with the chasing

now iam stuck with alot of tris around the cap and also alot of loops and i dont know how to clean this up
basicly iam looking for some advice how i can improve this stuff.
get a more even mesh and improve the flow
because i dont think i will look through all this chaos if i start to add the real details here
a small sketch with some coarse instructions would be more than welcome

ps.: oh i forgot to add, that this "should" have been the lowpoly version. i wanted to save it and make a high detailed one for baking.. but its already about 3000tris and only half done..


SnowInChina

praxedes

wow...why all those loops on the main body? It's a flat surface, with nothing being defined by the extra polys. If the polys aren't adding to the silhouette you don't need them!

You don't necessarily have to make everything as a single mesh- in fact it'd be easier not to. That way you can change between poly resolution, e.g. gun body to trigger, without generating lots of loops.

Hope that help- I'm afraid I am no expert or I'd do a paintover of the wire

~P~

Ged

yeah why are you making this into one mesh? any reason?

HAL

First of all don't use primitives in blender to model low poly stuff, at least from my experience that tends to end up like the mesh you have at the moment....

Most of the time i start with a plane and extrude the edges until I get the shape I want.

Also, alt-m is quite important in vertext select mode as you can simply merge vertices, weld them togehter.

Another important hotkey regarding this method of modeling is f... f will create a face between 2-4 vertices as blender doesnt support ngons atm.

If you want to clean it up, go into edge select mode, right click select an edge loop of your choice, press ctrl-e and then edge loop select - then hit x and select edgeloop... and the loop is gone.

Zwebbie

Remember, triangles are no problem. I know most people in the BlenderArtists forums claim they're evil, but those people haven't got a clue.

HAL wrote:

...right click select an edge loop of your choice, press ctrl-e...

Alt+RMB does that too; major time saver.

ajr2764

I painted over your wireframe very quickly to show the edge loops that need to be removed. The yellow circled area needs to be detached so you dont have to carry over those edges.

SnowInChina

Ged wrote: »

yeah why are you making this into one mesh? any reason?

like i said, iam new into this and i thought it would be better to have it into one part, since it is one part in real
not too shure about it though

and thanks for elveryone else
i will try to merge some things and delete the loops and post the result later on

SnowInChina

JonConley

It looks a lot like the front part of a revolver, so for real it is actually a bunch of different parts. How else would it spin and pop out for quicker reloading?

SnowInChina

ajr2764 wrote: »

I painted over your wireframe very quickly to show the edge loops that need to be removed. The yellow circled area needs to be detached so you dont have to carry over those edges.

so basicly i should detach everything that adds too much loops to it ?
i guess i should detach the pivot on the bottom too ?

JonConley wrote:

It looks a lot like the front part of a revolver, so for real it is actually a bunch of different parts. How else would it spin and pop out for quicker reloading?

quick sketch for the mechanical part (sry, no wacom yet)
not so sure how the fastener on the top will work, but thats not a big problem since there are many references on the net#

colours mark the detached parts, at least how i thought of it
not very acurate, but you get the idea

the basic problem was that i got many tris from joining the rounded cap on the top part and also many loops
i cleaned it up to some degree by joining all the verts (and got even more tris) but at least it looks alot cleaner now

iam just getting told everywhere that i should aim for zero tris in my model
and now iam getting told that it doesnt matter
really confused right now

couldnt find any real info where its pointed out why i should or shouldnt use tris for specific objects and what advantages/disadvantages i have from that

praxedes

Tris are considered bad for taking your work into a subdividing sculpting tool like zbrush (although these days it doesn't mind the odd tri).

Tris are pretty much essential for efficient poly count on your game mesh.

This is why modellers for games create a separate hi poly and low poly mesh and transfer details from one to the other- the high poly isn't just more detailed, it's structured to meet different needs.

~P~