Starting this a bit late but I finally found some time/motivation to model something for fun. Worked on this for the last couple days I haven't modeled shit in about 4 years so this was quite a challenge, all my sub d modeling skills have completely atrophied at this point.
Looking nice man, i would leave the edges as they are. They represent the scale of the model very well, any tighter and it will start to look a lot bigger than it should.
Yeah maybe I'm over thinking it, when I zoom in the edges look a bit blurry on the bolt and that's what got me thinking about tightening up the whole model.
Finished up the model, I think I'll go back and do a pass on some of the edges and tighten up the loops a bit in some areas, I think some of the bevels are looking a bit soft.
polygonfreak, the threads are a helix that clip into each other and clip into the sides of the pipe. You're welcome to check out the level 1 .obj file below and separate the elements and smooth to check out the individual pieces the model's made out of. http://www.malcolm341.com/misc/workshop3_pipe_malcolm.zip…
Poly: I'd suggest checking out Bitmap/Pedro's post. Along with the How you model them shapes FAQ over in tech talk. Maybe not the exact way his were made, but I suspect it wasn't too much different. Edit: Malcom: looking ace. I thought you had finished this ages ago though hah. EQ: as usual you've helped me solve a normal…
Here's the first pass ao bake. I had to go with xnormal as maya's native ao transfer maps is still broken in 2011. Can't believe they still haven't fixed that, they still don't support spread, and orthogonal reflection is disabled and there is no option to enable it so depending on the camera you are in the bake will look…
EQ I'm stuck, I merged in that detail as you suggested but when I bake it the triangulation there is giving me some ugly artifacts. What is the secret to getting rid of these. I've found anywhere on the low poly model that the normals look ugly it will create these artifacts in the normal map? Makes it pretty much…