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…
@Udjani You're on the right track. Sacboi is right about working through some additional block-outs to analyze the shape. There's a few distinct features that appear to be in conflict: the oblong boss appears to have a fixed width, the pattern draft appears to be relatively uniform and the complex profile appears to have…
@JBurk Overall you have the right idea and are pretty close with the second iteration. A few pages back there's a couple of relevant discussions about cylinder to cylinder intersections and multiple cylinder intersections close together. The basic idea is to block out all of the key features then adjust the segments of…
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…
@tatertots You're welcome and thank you for sharing your results and followup questions. Example images in my previous post only show the initial block out, the final topology with a smoothing preview and the final subdivision model with a shiny material to highlight any artifacts. Only showing the starting and ending…
What I'm trying to say is: The stack is not pivotal to the way I work. I mean the actual assembly of modifiers subsequently building off of each other. Modifiers themselves are a huge part of my workflow, and I view them as time saving operations to be committed to the model, nothing more. I'm not sure what our disconnect…
@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…
@vakdlfjas Welcome to Polycount. Consider checking out the forum information and introduction thread. Placing support loops along the edges that make up the walls of a cylinder will causing pinching. The topology needs to be routed around the existing cylinder geometry so it doesn't interfere with the smoothing behavior at…
@ConvexSurface Overall it looks like you have the right idea but sometimes connecting directly to a curve's existing polygon grid can cause a lot of smoothing issues. In these cases it's often better to place the intersecting geometry between the existing segments of the curved surface and use the existing curve geometry…
@guitarguy00 It really depends on the size of the object and whether or not it will be seen up close by the player. Fastener threads usually aren't something that players are looking at up close. Adding this kind of detail in Substance painter is probably the fastest and easiest route. Using floaters probably makes sense…