@jimdrawandmake A couple of posts above there's a discussion about preserving crisp edges and sharp corners when merging cylinders into other shapes. There's also a recent post about merging details into curved geometry and that links back to a previous discussion that may be useful for other parts of the shapes in the…
Sure, first off there are pretty much two ways to do hard edge stuff without adding in extra geometry, that i know of. First is to use smoothing groups for your hard edges in max. One of the big disadvantages to doing this is that you always have infinately hard edges. Really nothing in life has an edge that hard, so it…
@tatertots I was planning on going through the weekly hard surface modeling challenge from 2014 (though I'm no where near prepared and instead decided to first go through all of Frank's detailed posts here). What you talk about with N-Gons and bevels to create the topology and join them up, I'm getting a good understand of…
@KungFuCactus Edit: I thought you used max. Oh well, this is how I would do it in max.. For ease of modificatioin you can do displacement with a heightmap, or even bake the heightmap into the normals, but if you're like me you want to model it in because you want to model it in. In that case, you can get away with some…
Manual alignment sucks. Avoid it when you can. Follow the lines and look for intersecting points. People are lazy so the angles of the intersecting lines are probably whole numbers and have some commonality. Start simple and work into the complexity. Avoid over complicating things. Lots of flat surfaces to hide tris and…
@ArcticTauntaun That's understandable: the reality is it's more contextual than absolute. The key is learning when it's ok and when it's not. Sometimes it even comes down to something as simple as budget and object scale. Low budget, small stuff can't be polished to the Nth degree if you plan to make money off it. Using…
Great to see all of the community input on different approaches for the modeling operations. @abronee Have to agree with @ZacD: The primary issue here is figuring out the basic shapes that the designer used to generate the overall form. Gathering some additional references [Turn around images.] should make it easier to see…
@CodeferBlue In general: flat surfaces are largely uneffected by messy topology so the accuracy, consistency and flow of the topology around the curved shapes and shape transitions is arguably the most important. An overly rigid grid topology can interrupt the edge flow around the circular features so it's best to have a…
I believe that thinking in terms of how subdivison surfaces work fundamentally will help you both in this particular case and in the future, when you'll be facing similar issues. It helps me a lot to understand that, anyhow. Let's take a closer look at your geometry and try to think of what actually happens when you switch…
@Herbert You're on the right path and the mesh just needs some minor adjustments. When evaluating any potential smoothing artifacts it's worth considering the following factors: * How large is the object? * How closely will the player view the object? * How severe is the smoothing artifact? If the smoothing artifact is…