Kevin Johnstone modular tutorial question
I was looking at Kevin Johnstone's tutorial about using the grid in max and making Lego type pieces. He said he used the bend modifier, but I am having trouble how he achieved both domes using it. Any idea on how he did it?
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Getting the surface curvature like this on high-poly pieces instead of the easier-to-wrangle lowpoly geometry is generally something you should only do for presentation renders of your highpoly, rather than part of your actual game environment art process. After all, the idea of the modular set is to use one tiling texture on a variety of surfaces. And it's much easier to generate that tiling texture using the simple uncurved basic modular piece. However you can still use the bend modifier to do this on instanced high-poly bricks by applying the modifiers to the whole group of instances at once.
As a side note, try playing with the position of the Bend widget and the Limits values to have more control over how things fit on a grid.
If you've moved to high/low creation its a good idea, especially if you're manipulating a set of high poly objects. However you still have to be careful because you can sill wonder off the grid fairly easily with bend modifiers if they aren't snapped to the grid, even precise numbers don't always land on the grid.
That's quite a bit more work, less accurate and won't squash things quite like a bend modifier would. You are also left creating bends by eyeballing it unlike with the bend modifier you know exactly that its bent 90 degrees. BUT you may not want the squash that a bend modifier puts on things in that case, it might work to do it the long way.