Geometry issues with car back door

[mattmos]

I think you just need an extra edgeloop around the wheel rim, flush with the body of the car. That way the 5 pointer won't disupt the flow of the geo.

[wannabeArtist]

I'm not really sure what you mean by that another edge loop - If I add it, I just end up with this:




http://i39.tinypic.com/r0cxg8.jpg





...still having the sharp turn, but perhaps I misunderstood your point?

[PiotrekM]

There are many ways to achieve what you want. I overpainted your wire with simple loop-adding

Remember this is not organic model, you can get away with tris and ngons if they dont mess up your mesh flow after smoothing.

Fast way to learn hard surf modelling is to study other people's meshes.Ive attached one wire for you (its NOT MINE)

[wannabeArtist]

Thanks,

I did try to look at some other car meshes before I posted, but not with great success.

Adding edges as you drew will help, but I would be really interested in learning the "correct" topology for this - with very little geometry. I am following a tutorial and the purpose of such tweaking is to get the mesh as good as possible before subdividing it and thus adding geometry.

Here's yet another example of my obsession :) Left side is the way it looks without pressing +-key and the right one is with pressing the key twice. What drives me crazy, is the way the highlighted polygon gets stretched to a square shape, even though it follows the seam nicely before the plus key.

Also, what is the difference of "pressing the plus key" and "actually subdividing"? (Poly. Mesh -> Subdivision)

http://i41.tinypic.com/124wpi8.jpg

[ace63]

Thanks,

Also, what is the difference of "pressing the plus key" and "actually subdividing"? (Poly. Mesh -> Subdivision)



Well the result is basically the same, only when you press + it subdivides internally and you can't modify the resulting mesh - when you actually go and do Poly Mesh -> Subd, you get a real subdivided mesh, but they look exactly the same.

Also, why don't you model the pieces as 2 seperate Objects when they are seperate on the actual car?

[mocaw]

You need to flow more with your mesh. Look at some face models done well and you'll see that special attention is given to when you need to radiate away from a opening that is circular.

A friend of mine is a good sub-patch modeler...and is a quad freak (namely because he's using LW 9.x which does not support Ngons well and because it's his religion to model with only quads when he can)...

Anyway- this is all quads but I'll see if I can get a wire render of it:

http://javisjones.com/portfolio/2005-mclaren-f1-lm/

The basics can be seen in this toon car he did... look at the non-dented left front fender to see what I mean...

http://javisjones.com/portfolio/opel-car/

Is this going to be a game model? Don't forget that there are a lot of good tools in XSI for tweaking topology- best of all just deleting edges !

[Mic_Ma]

How precise does this thing have to be? You could model it in parts or use a map to create the seam, depending on what you need. You can also make a rough version of it, then create a subdived mesh out of it and tweak the mishapen polys manually.

In my experience models seldom (never?) need to be of microscopic accuracy. If it is a still you can photoshop it and if it moves, well then nobody's gonna notice anyway.

If engineering precision is neccessary I wouldn't go with subd.

[wannabeArtist]

Wow, something messed up with my notification system - only one email this morning and yet 3 answers :)

Anyways, Leo, I did think about going panel by panel originally and even asked about this approach here: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=25&t=734203

However, this was not the way this was done in the tutorial I'm following (not the same car of course) and as I got an answer for that thread warning about reflection issues if not starting as one piece, I didn't model that way.

In the tutorial they chop out the pieces later, but I also though I might stop at the backdoor and do the rest of the back as separate piece now that I have a little more experience in this. Thanks for explaining that subdividing difference, I have been wondering about that for a while :)


Gideon, thanks for the links! your friend's McLaren is a beauty and pretty much the level of accuracy I'm trying to reach with this model.
This model is supposed to be a part of my portfolio as I'm trying to get an entry level job in the industry. So it would be a still or a "turn table model", but not really used in a game.

I guess, I'm also a quad freak :D All the videos and other study material so far have been quite obsessive about all-quads - a lesson well learned ;)

Murkus, like above, I did think about the part by part approach, but as I have no prior experience in car models, I decided to humbly stick with the tutorial (but that tutorial car doesn't have a back door).

I'm trying to make this model "reasonably" accurate but, like said, it is a still model. I have already finished the front fender and well... most of the car, so subd will be the method for the rest of this model. But just out of curiosity, what should one choose for "perfect" accuracy? nurbs patches?

Thanks for everybody!

[wannabeArtist]

As to continue my hunt for those evil triangles (neccessary or not), here's another issue I ran into when continuing to the back of the car:

http://i40.tinypic.com/2z5nct4.jpg

So here I tried to minimize the edges that would run up the narrow piece between roof and windows and rather turn them to the back of the trunk. Well, after some intuitive tweaking I noticed that I had - again - created a triangle in the back blinker area.... I fixed that as you can see from the pics, but I'm not really satisfied with this: no triangles, but no there is this odd flow of couple of edges that don't look like they belong there :) Any tips?

[wannabeArtist]

Phew, yet another post :)

I think, I may have fixed this - what do you think? I deleted one edge and did some reorganizing and ended up with this - better?

http://i42.tinypic.com/a1gtw6.jpg

[mocaw]

You're starting to get the idea of "flow"!

[geothefaust]

Hey there! That is starting to really take shape. Like Gideon said, it's all about the flow of your polygons. Truly this applies to any thing that you model, organic or hard edged objects, like your car.


One thing I try to keep in mind when modeling, is the closer you have one edge to another, the tighter/harder the edge will be. The more even spaced each edge is, the smoother the surface will be.


Anyway, keep it up. It looks good in the last screenshots you posted there.

PS- I rendered some new wireframes and posted them on my site so that it may help you.

http://javisjones.com/portfolio/2005-mclaren-f1-lm/

[wannabeArtist]

Thanks, guys!

Special thanks to Javis for those renders, that was very helpful!

I'm pretty happy with the back light area and although it's still very initial geometry the flow seems to work much better now.

That's very true about the edges, I think I managed to capture some of the more tighter bends especially around the front fender of this model by just adding very close edge loops around those areas. Split edge is really your friend in those areas :)

However, the back door of the car is still giving me gray hair :D I think, I'll print out some pictures of the car (rotoscope as well as other reference) and try to draw the major edges on them by hand. Perhaps this exercise will help to come up with a better flow.

[geothefaust]

Cool, glad they helped. :)


Drawing the contours of the vehicle is a great idea by the way, I did the same thing for a while when I first started modeling too.


Goodluck!!

[wannabeArtist]

Thanks again!

Actually I didn't draw it more than once (on paper). Then I decided to try another trick: I cut of the entire back part from the back door seam, then tweaked both parts separately (hiding one of them, when working on other) until I was satisfied with it.

This seemed to "open up" the form for me. Not perfect, of course, but enough for now - I need start getting things done also, as I seem to have a bad habit of over-tweaking :)

Here's the resulting subdivided mesh with back door and taillight highlighted. Now it's time to start working on the back fender!

http://i39.tinypic.com/2wna2yw.jpg

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