March Challenge – ROBOTS

Hi Mel

any chance we get a closeup of the guns (detail)
Because it looks like you worked hard on them.

May I also ask how you got your primatives to blend so well in 3DC.

the reason i ask is i own BRYCE,CARRARA,VUE,and Cinama 4D and 3DC and as great as 3dc is i find very demanding on my computer to smooth alot. how are you getting around that?
are you using object blend? and then smooth?

anyway great work and do we get to see a end render?

again great work!

Kirk_saavedra

Same problem here- I get to a certain point of smoothing and 3DC stops. Too much?
KB

Actually, it was made with v6.0’s Autosmoothing feature.(right-click on object]Properties]then adjust the Autosmoothing slider. The bug was done at Smoothing Level 2, Tension 1.)

I started by modeling with simple cubes and primitives, using extrusion and point/edge deformation. The autosmoothing kept everything all curvy and sleek.

That’s all there is to it, basically.

-Mel

Working with the subdivision surfaces is sort of a black art…it just happened to be well-suited to the way I was already modeling.

Normally I start with a single cube, and extrude/deform it to the basic overall shape. I try to avoid using more than one primitive, unless the shape I need can’t be extruded from one of the faces. The eyes and lenses are deformed, subdivided spheres..the crash bar is an Extrude object, as are the hatch handles on the back of the bug.

The guns were pretty easy…I don’t think I spent more than 15-20 minutes on them. I also try to avoid boolean operations because they’re messy, so I got the ventilated effect on the lower guns by duplicating a ring shape that looked sort of like a castle tower, and then deforming edges to make the andquot;holesandquot; hexagonal in shape.

The upper guns are just extruded/deformed cylinders and a cube.

Almost all of the detail on the bug’s surface is extruded either negatively or positively and then deformed to shape. I try to avoid intersecting objects unless it can’t be helped, like the eyes, smoke dischargers, and the crash bar. Intersecting objects look bad at low detail levels, but when you smooth them a lot, the intersections look cleaner.

The legs…I did a Boolean subtraction of the lower leg from the upper leg when it was still unsmoothed and cleaned up all the vertices. I smoothed them after the subtraction/cleanup, but the fit isn’t as clean as I would have liked. I also subtracted cubes from the lower body to make the hip joint wells…again, the fit isn’t as clean as I would have liked.

I stopped working with the subdivision surfaces because the rest of 3DC can’t keep up with it. I can’t really texture the bug because 3DC either chokes on the high pointcount or doesn’t get the UVs right if I try texturing it before smoothing it. It also slows down significantly on this low-end 1Ghz machine with all those smoothed objects in the scene.

The subdivision surfaces aren’t useful to me in professional projects right now, but I’m hoping later versions will improve upon the idiosyncrasies in 6.0.

It was a fun project, but 3DC at the moment is kind of like a young girl with big boobs…she looks mature for her age, but she isn’t old enough to deal with it comfortably. Sorta.

-Mel

Hey Mel,

I sort-of figured some of the model..I’ve played with sub-D alittle on other programs. My system is alot slower than yours andnbsp;:-/so I might not try something so big when I start playing with it. ( My system, P III 650Mhz, Win 98se, 64Mb GeForce4 440 card, 384 RAM ) Maybe you can use another program to texture and render??? Just want to see it in a more finished state. Any-hoo…really nice model. Still inspiring…. <!– s;) –><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_wink.gif" alt="" title="Wink" /><!– s;) –>

Mel — Great job on building the model. It is good to see someone trying to push the limits of the 3DC tool.

You mention the difficulty you have with the UV mapping/texturing. The poly painting will not work effectively due to the texture you’re trying to represent (as the camoflauge shapes are not going to match your polys). And, since 3DC’s UV mapping is not distorted to match the smoothing, one has to UV map in the high-poly smoothed model, which would likely be too much.

Would UU3D (or perhaps 3DC) handle the mapping task better if you use many texture maps for the body, or is that what you have been attempting? I guess a better solution would be if 3DC distorted the low-poly UV co-ordinates to match the smoothing?

Cal.

Yeah, I tried texturing the model in Ultimate Unwrap3D….the results weren’t what I would quite call acceptable, and with over 25,000 quads on the main body alone at full smoothing, I don’t see myself manually selecting that many faces and mapping them in anything approaching an efficient manner.

It also brought UU3D to its knees. However, I could get away with just coloring the faces…but that isn’t acceptable either because there’s no real way to create accurate panel lines and such in 3DC on non-angular surfaces. And the texture I wanted for it was a camouflage one as well.

-Mel