random question guys (and experts) - how would I go about approaching a boat hull?
I normally attempt to model something in a low-poly - put in the needed chamfers/loops to keep it's edges and shape, and then use turbosmooth or something else to subdivide/smooth.
-this time when modeling the hull - I modeled it with what i though was the necessary polys. Later I needed to create edge loops across the curved hull for further details - and when smoothed, the surface now looks rippled.
**ahah found the word - there is no longer a smooth curvature...**.
Example - as the mesh that was smoothed between only two points (like a nice bezier curve), now it has a few edge loops in between ruining the smooth surface.
should've I just subdivided before adding this to the hull - or other?
might be an obvious solution, but I've got a bit of a brain freeze at the moment..
Let's get some more simple yet slightly complicated shapes going?
I'd try to find something alone (I'm a hard beginner) but I don't want to go too easy or hard on myself...
I have only one question about n-gons! Are they allowed when trying to get a shape??
Everything is allowed.
A N-gon or triangle in a complex spot is frequently the source of bad smoothing and should be the first place you look when trying to fix something however. 80% of a model is probably a bad place for an n-gon or triangle. The other 20% it will have no effect or in fact be useful.
The end result is the thing that matters, not the process.
Yes I think so, I dont really use them. I like to keep it basic to ease export to max/maya/etc.
Sorry it may be offtopic but since you mentioned it I am curious about your workflow between Maya/Max and Modo. How do you divide the labour between them and for which you prefer each. I am asking since I really like Modo but I cannot help to notice some limitations that need a complex workaround.
Sorry it may be offtopic but since you mentioned it I am curious about your workflow between Maya/Max and Modo. How do you divide the labour between them and for which you prefer each. I am asking since I really like Modo but I cannot help to notice some limitations that need a complex workaround.
Well first off, I do mostly hard-surface work, and I do virtually all of my high poly sub-D, lowpoly, and UV work in Modo. Modo excells as a straight-up modeling app.
There are a few very specific task that are done better in Max, like instancing many objects on a spline, but this accounts for such a small % of actual work that its generally not an issue. Max has some really powerful tools in that regard, working with the modifier stack etc.
I would never switch to Maya for any modeling related task, as it's out of the box tools are poor, and offers no advantages for me over Modo/Max. Maya is a weird sort of 3d app, seemingly designed by and for programmers, not artists.
In Max/Maya, I do scene setup, mesh normal setup(hard edges, smoothing groups etc), bakes, and real-time shader preview. If I did rigging/animation, that would be done in Max/Maya as well.
Thanks for the insight and yeah modo is just an awesome modeling tool can't agree more on that.And on final note the one point in modeling that Modo is missing for me are splines, even if they are kind of there don't find them as useful, I wonder if you have any workaround that?
PS
Can't help to notice sometimes the lack of threads with inbetween apps workflow
Sorry, I actually use mostly just the very basic features of modo, I don't do anything particularly fancy with it. You may want to check out Seneca's scripts though; http://www.indigosm.com/modoscripts.htm
Sorry, I actually use mostly just the very basic features of modo, I don't do anything particularly fancy with it. You may want to check out Seneca's scripts though; http://www.indigosm.com/modoscripts.htm
Yeah a great place for Modo users, I already use SuperTaut.
Okay I'm having some trouble. In the image below, the bottom row shows what I originally had set up to support the edges of my model. I didn't want to add an entire new line down the length of my model because it looked "off" in the render, so i connected a few vertices closer together. As you can see, it looked scrunched in the render.
The top is what I just recently did, and it got rid of the scrunch, but it left two 5 sided polygons. However, considering this is a high-poly, does this matter? I know I couldn't do this with a low poly because a game engine could render it strangely, but will I run into any problems like this?
I only ask because I've tried a few different approaches and so far this is the only that doesn't cause the "scrunch"...am I doing something wrong?
It's not okay though if it gets sent to a studio doing a CG intro for your game, because some poor soul then has to fix your lazy modeling...
Why?
Because ngons will make their offline renderers explode?
If it looks good, it is good. Game art, pre-rendered cinematics, it doesn't matter. This "use quads for sub-d" has roots in ancient/poor software that litterally could not sub-divide triangles or ngons.
Unless you have some extremely specific reason to only use quads, really, there isn't an issue.
Le Sigh, I feel so helpless when trying to model sometimes. I've tried about three different methods and every one looks pinched in render. I don't know how to sure up the edges without making the model look pinched, and right now the corners are too round. Can someone help me? Is there an easy way to get the same effect, or is there another way to sure up the edges and make them harder without pinching the model?
I don't think this would be so difficult if the object wasn't round and egg like.
All you should need are some support looks here(red), you could also consider collapsing the green lines here, but not sure if thats needed.
Cut in some extra geo(blue) and tweak a bit/pull it out from the surface a little if you need to, to keep the smooth curve.
ZacD: I don't think you can say its "wrong", its important to understand how to do raw highpoly modeling, as a learning exercise at the very least, you wont always be able to hack it with floaters, so might as well learn to do it properly.
@EarthQuake I didn't mean he should just rely on floating geo for all modeling details, I meant the he's approaching the detail wrong with the sharp angles that wont show up well in the bake
Because ngons will make their offline renderers explode?
Although I meant it somewhat as a joke, there are reasons.
Depending on the renderer, yes it can cause problems.
More importantly Zbrush won't take it either and there are cases where you want to sculpt even hard surface objects (particularly in fantasy themed projects).
And floating geo will not work in any offline renderer, I think we can agree on that part
@EarthQuake I didn't mean he should just rely on floating geo for all modeling details, I meant the he's approaching the detail wrong with the sharp angles that wont show up well in the bake
What does his edges being too sharp have to do with floaters? Completely different subjects/issues. There is no "wrong" here. If you're of the subjective opinion that his edges are too sharp here(could be, or not, we don't know the scale of the object), that is fine, but it really doesn't have anything to do with floaters or not.
Although I meant it somewhat as a joke, there are reasons.
Depending on the renderer, yes it can cause problems.
More importantly Zbrush won't take it either and there are cases where you want to sculpt even hard surface objects (particularly in fantasy themed projects).
And floating geo will not work in any offline renderer, I think we can agree on that part
Any rendering or zbrush issues would be cured by simply sub-dividing the mesh one level(thus quadifing). Certainly not the most efficient solution, though.
However I would never waste my time making sure my entire mesh is made up of quads just on the off chance that maybe it would be used for something later, and maybe it would be a problem. Thats not lazyiness, its just being efficient with your work. If you know for a fact its going to be used in a cinematic, and X renderer has problems with X issues, or you're creating a mesh for sculpting(in which case there would be many other issues here with his mesh as well) that is one thing.
Yes, we can agree that floaters are a different problem, but we were talking about ngons so...
Why is that? I see a lot of high poly models with plenty of floating geo. Also, what do you mean by "offline renderer"?
By offline renderer, he means something that isn't realtime. A CPU renderer, when you render in your 3d app of choice and you have to wait a while for it to finish.
Floaters aren't going to technically "break" anything in an offline renderer, and you can even get away with certain types of intersecting and floating geometry, however you get problems when you "float" indented surfaces on top of your mesh, as they then cast shadows, and show up from accute angles. But would never be a problem in a normal map bake, because the normal map is raytraced by looking straight "out" from the mesh normals.
If you look at the little screw floaters here, you'll see the shadow issue:
@ vergatom & EarthQuake: Thanks for the explanations.
My head hurts. I went back and added the support edges that were suggested, but the result is that there is still a significant scrunching effect. I am at a loss here guys. I don't know what to do, I've literally tried every combination I can think of, even adding a whole bunch of useless loops in an attempt to maybe "spread" the scrunch effect but it just makes it worse. I would really love it if someone could tell me what I'm missing here, because I really want to know.
Why is this happening? Is it just the nature of the model preventing me from being able to get the shape I want? I feel like a bloody idiot because the look I'm going for doesn't seem to be anywhere NEAR as complicated as half the stuff in this thread. I want to get better at subd/highpoly modeling but everything I've tried so far has failed. I realize I could most likely work around it with floating geo, but I want to know WHY I can't get this to work.
I know I must be annoying by now, but I am honestly struggling here.
deoseph - after just figuring out my own probs, all I can suggest is more subdivision/mesh before shaping it?
the 'banding' or ripples I'm pretty sure would be minimized and solved by that - just try it out on a cylinder of maybe 30 to 50+ sides (looks like yours is around 24?)
The banding is happening because of how you inserted the new loops to hold the shape. They're working to hold your indents, but they're also reinforcing the flatness of the polygons they're now splitting.
To fix that, you'll need to push them outward slightly so they also contribute to the roundness. Either eyeball it, or create a new cylinder with double the amounts of sides as the current to use as a guide, possibly even snap to.
However I would never waste my time making sure my entire mesh is made up of quads just on the off chance that maybe it would be used for something later, and maybe it would be a problem.
It was a JOKE! Come on, don't take it so seriously
Sorry if I was a bit snarky, like half my posts in tech talk are fighting against the current of bad, over-repeated advice.
No problem.
Nevertheless, modeling in all quads is a valuable skill IMHO, especially with organic stuff that almost always gets the Zbrush treatment nowadays. But it's not a necessary one and eventually software may be able to handle the lack of it anyway.
Yeah, for anything that is going to be sculpted, modeling in all quads and - equally as important - modeling with evenly sized square quads is an extremely important skill.
EarthQuake, I was looking at the link in your sig to the Brink work. Those guns look amazing.
I'm trying to do a gun of my own as I've never tried one before. I was hoping you could answer a simple question for me: when you're doing the high and low polies for those guns, did you do them all as heaps of different little meshes or is it all one pieces.
Here's a link to the concept I'm working on: Concept
I've attached a pic of where I'm at with the high poly. Still working on the scaling and modeling. You can see that at the moment everything is a heap of separate meshes. Is this approach okay for when I go to do the bakes? and is it okay to do the low poly as a heap of separate pieces like this too?
Dude.. Besided the point that you asked, let me just say this to you. That concept is pretty bland.
One of the things i like to see on a model, is the design of it. Right now.. Even if you did a perfect hipoly and then lowpoly +textures... it would still be bland even if you did it to a perfect execution simply because the design is bland and unispired.
Really man. Choose a better/cooler design to work from.
Dude.. Besided the point that you asked, let me just say this to you. That concept is pretty bland.
One of the things i like to see on a model, is the design of it. Right now.. Even if you did a perfect hipoly and then lowpoly +textures... it would still be bland even if you did it to a perfect execution simply because the design is bland and unispired.
Really man. Choose a better/cooler design to work from.
I appreciate your opinion. To be honest, I like the concept, save for a few design choices. I've almost finished the high poly now, so I think I'll just go ahead and finish it, as I never finish things. After that I'll try something with a better design.
EarthQuake, I was looking at the link in your sig to the Brink work. Those guns look amazing.
I'm trying to do a gun of my own as I've never tried one before. I was hoping you could answer a simple question for me: when you're doing the high and low polies for those guns, did you do them all as heaps of different little meshes or is it all one pieces.
Here's a link to the concept I'm working on: Concept
I've attached a pic of where I'm at with the high poly. Still working on the scaling and modeling. You can see that at the moment everything is a heap of separate meshes. Is this approach okay for when I go to do the bakes? and is it okay to do the low poly as a heap of separate pieces like this too?
cheers.
Thanks for the comments man.
Generally I model in as many smaller chunks as is efficient, often times it just makes sense to have a large amount of small pieces, as complex objects tend to be built up from multiple pieces anyway. So defintely do not spend much time trying to model things as one large chunk.
I do have to agree with Pedro though, personally I would find a concept that has been designed from not only the side view, but from a perspective/first person view right now. The concept you're going off of now is really just a bunch of boxes and a couple cylinders, there isn't much interest to it.
Because it is so flat and blocky, it would be extremely boring to see this asset in FPV in video game. Creating or choosing a good concept is such a huge part of making a good model.
Replies
I don't have it open right now, but I'm pretty sure you can type a number higher than what sliding would allow.
You'd think so
*insert edge loop normally and go to its node control (on right)
Thanks
I normally attempt to model something in a low-poly - put in the needed chamfers/loops to keep it's edges and shape, and then use turbosmooth or something else to subdivide/smooth.
-this time when modeling the hull - I modeled it with what i though was the necessary polys. Later I needed to create edge loops across the curved hull for further details - and when smoothed, the surface now looks rippled.
**ahah found the word - there is no longer a smooth curvature...**.
Example - as the mesh that was smoothed between only two points (like a nice bezier curve), now it has a few edge loops in between ruining the smooth surface.
should've I just subdivided before adding this to the hull - or other?
might be an obvious solution, but I've got a bit of a brain freeze at the moment..
I'd try to find something alone (I'm a hard beginner) but I don't want to go too easy or hard on myself...
rablivate dont know what you are asking for, there are tons of those types of examples i think on this forum. But feel free to explain a little more
I have only one question about n-gons! Are they allowed when trying to get a shape??
Everything is allowed.
A N-gon or triangle in a complex spot is frequently the source of bad smoothing and should be the first place you look when trying to fix something however. 80% of a model is probably a bad place for an n-gon or triangle. The other 20% it will have no effect or in fact be useful.
The end result is the thing that matters, not the process.
Sorry it may be offtopic but since you mentioned it I am curious about your workflow between Maya/Max and Modo. How do you divide the labour between them and for which you prefer each. I am asking since I really like Modo but I cannot help to notice some limitations that need a complex workaround.
Well first off, I do mostly hard-surface work, and I do virtually all of my high poly sub-D, lowpoly, and UV work in Modo. Modo excells as a straight-up modeling app.
There are a few very specific task that are done better in Max, like instancing many objects on a spline, but this accounts for such a small % of actual work that its generally not an issue. Max has some really powerful tools in that regard, working with the modifier stack etc.
I would never switch to Maya for any modeling related task, as it's out of the box tools are poor, and offers no advantages for me over Modo/Max. Maya is a weird sort of 3d app, seemingly designed by and for programmers, not artists.
In Max/Maya, I do scene setup, mesh normal setup(hard edges, smoothing groups etc), bakes, and real-time shader preview. If I did rigging/animation, that would be done in Max/Maya as well.
PS
Can't help to notice sometimes the lack of threads with inbetween apps workflow
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/190/hkusp9.jpg/
I can get the overall shape, but when i try to add edges to get that saw shape i mess the whole mesh :poly127:
The top is what I just recently did, and it got rid of the scrunch, but it left two 5 sided polygons. However, considering this is a high-poly, does this matter? I know I couldn't do this with a low poly because a game engine could render it strangely, but will I run into any problems like this?
I only ask because I've tried a few different approaches and so far this is the only that doesn't cause the "scrunch"...am I doing something wrong?
It's not okay though if it gets sent to a studio doing a CG intro for your game, because some poor soul then has to fix your lazy modeling...
Why?
Because ngons will make their offline renderers explode?
If it looks good, it is good. Game art, pre-rendered cinematics, it doesn't matter. This "use quads for sub-d" has roots in ancient/poor software that litterally could not sub-divide triangles or ngons.
Unless you have some extremely specific reason to only use quads, really, there isn't an issue.
I don't think this would be so difficult if the object wasn't round and egg like.
For that type of shape I'd just use floating geo...
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1363268&postcount=9
Cut in some extra geo(blue) and tweak a bit/pull it out from the surface a little if you need to, to keep the smooth curve.
ZacD: I don't think you can say its "wrong", its important to understand how to do raw highpoly modeling, as a learning exercise at the very least, you wont always be able to hack it with floaters, so might as well learn to do it properly.
Although I meant it somewhat as a joke, there are reasons.
Depending on the renderer, yes it can cause problems.
More importantly Zbrush won't take it either and there are cases where you want to sculpt even hard surface objects (particularly in fantasy themed projects).
And floating geo will not work in any offline renderer, I think we can agree on that part
Why is that? I see a lot of high poly models with plenty of floating geo. Also, what do you mean by "offline renderer"?
What does his edges being too sharp have to do with floaters? Completely different subjects/issues. There is no "wrong" here. If you're of the subjective opinion that his edges are too sharp here(could be, or not, we don't know the scale of the object), that is fine, but it really doesn't have anything to do with floaters or not.
Any rendering or zbrush issues would be cured by simply sub-dividing the mesh one level(thus quadifing). Certainly not the most efficient solution, though.
However I would never waste my time making sure my entire mesh is made up of quads just on the off chance that maybe it would be used for something later, and maybe it would be a problem. Thats not lazyiness, its just being efficient with your work. If you know for a fact its going to be used in a cinematic, and X renderer has problems with X issues, or you're creating a mesh for sculpting(in which case there would be many other issues here with his mesh as well) that is one thing.
Yes, we can agree that floaters are a different problem, but we were talking about ngons so...
By offline renderer, he means something that isn't realtime. A CPU renderer, when you render in your 3d app of choice and you have to wait a while for it to finish.
Floaters aren't going to technically "break" anything in an offline renderer, and you can even get away with certain types of intersecting and floating geometry, however you get problems when you "float" indented surfaces on top of your mesh, as they then cast shadows, and show up from accute angles. But would never be a problem in a normal map bake, because the normal map is raytraced by looking straight "out" from the mesh normals.
If you look at the little screw floaters here, you'll see the shadow issue:
My head hurts. I went back and added the support edges that were suggested, but the result is that there is still a significant scrunching effect. I am at a loss here guys. I don't know what to do, I've literally tried every combination I can think of, even adding a whole bunch of useless loops in an attempt to maybe "spread" the scrunch effect but it just makes it worse. I would really love it if someone could tell me what I'm missing here, because I really want to know.
Why is this happening? Is it just the nature of the model preventing me from being able to get the shape I want? I feel like a bloody idiot because the look I'm going for doesn't seem to be anywhere NEAR as complicated as half the stuff in this thread. I want to get better at subd/highpoly modeling but everything I've tried so far has failed. I realize I could most likely work around it with floating geo, but I want to know WHY I can't get this to work.
I know I must be annoying by now, but I am honestly struggling here.
the 'banding' or ripples I'm pretty sure would be minimized and solved by that - just try it out on a cylinder of maybe 30 to 50+ sides (looks like yours is around 24?)
To fix that, you'll need to push them outward slightly so they also contribute to the roundness. Either eyeball it, or create a new cylinder with double the amounts of sides as the current to use as a guide, possibly even snap to.
and the file: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4704618/adam_jensen_phallic.obj
It was a JOKE! Come on, don't take it so seriously
http://edgesize.com/captures/dildo_001.obj
96sides
http://edgesize.com/captures/dildo2.obj
No problem.
Nevertheless, modeling in all quads is a valuable skill IMHO, especially with organic stuff that almost always gets the Zbrush treatment nowadays. But it's not a necessary one and eventually software may be able to handle the lack of it anyway.
I'm trying to do a gun of my own as I've never tried one before. I was hoping you could answer a simple question for me: when you're doing the high and low polies for those guns, did you do them all as heaps of different little meshes or is it all one pieces.
Here's a link to the concept I'm working on: Concept
I've attached a pic of where I'm at with the high poly. Still working on the scaling and modeling. You can see that at the moment everything is a heap of separate meshes. Is this approach okay for when I go to do the bakes? and is it okay to do the low poly as a heap of separate pieces like this too?
cheers.
One of the things i like to see on a model, is the design of it. Right now.. Even if you did a perfect hipoly and then lowpoly +textures... it would still be bland even if you did it to a perfect execution simply because the design is bland and unispired.
Really man. Choose a better/cooler design to work from.
I appreciate your opinion. To be honest, I like the concept, save for a few design choices. I've almost finished the high poly now, so I think I'll just go ahead and finish it, as I never finish things. After that I'll try something with a better design.
Thanks for the comments man.
Generally I model in as many smaller chunks as is efficient, often times it just makes sense to have a large amount of small pieces, as complex objects tend to be built up from multiple pieces anyway. So defintely do not spend much time trying to model things as one large chunk.
I do have to agree with Pedro though, personally I would find a concept that has been designed from not only the side view, but from a perspective/first person view right now. The concept you're going off of now is really just a bunch of boxes and a couple cylinders, there isn't much interest to it.
Because it is so flat and blocky, it would be extremely boring to see this asset in FPV in video game. Creating or choosing a good concept is such a huge part of making a good model.