I've been working on learning and understanding hard surface modeling. To learn I decided to model the 2nd Gen Light Cycle from Tron: Legacy. I managed to make the front "wheel" (Well enough for now) and I have a base mesh for the body but I've been trying to cut out the windows in the style of this movie reference image:…
Not sure if this was mentioned already, but if you are baking normal maps, then for every hard edge (in other words, split vertex normals) you will need to split the UVs and give some padding between the two sides of the UV. This helps to prevent lighting errors when the texture is down-sampled. However, the reverse is…
Hello, im new here. I've been trying to fix the topology of this area, but im having a hard time. This is how it looked like before Then i tried on 2 different ways to fix the topology and fill the empty space, but honestly im not sure if any of them were right. Any suggestions or tips?
Its hard to say without seeing a smoothed shot without wires, but from the looks of it, your edges are just so hard, that there wouldn't be much difference either way.
Then the terminated region for that extruded shape must be quadified, alongside the use of existing geometry to support applicable hard edged topology. i.e.
You need to plan a bit ahead and make sure you have enough edges to go from smooth -> hard. If you have a hard time planning ahead, re-iterate, polygons are free. No idea how your shapes looks before hand or what you're going for, but this is one way of how I would go from smooth surface to hard contour.