When we left off I told you about my really basic, square shaped cup that I modeled in 3ds Max. And that I had chosen to leave the corners as they were even though I knew it wasn’t correct. I also acknowledged that this would cause a problem later.
Because I placed my edge loops so close to the corners, for stylistic reasons, when I applied turbosmooth I had a bit of bunching and the corners ended up raised. I like this in the cup. And for the cup it’s fine. Where it became a problem was when I went to create the bowl. In the interest of efficiency and scale, I decided the best way to make the bowl was going to be to base it off the cup. A bit of scaling up to make it wider and down to make it shorter and then pull the edges out to give it a wide lip. Sounds easy enough. And for the most part it was. Cool.
Then I tried a render and something was off around the edges of the lip. I was getting these funny folds. I did not save a render of this. I know it would have helped you understand what I’m saying. Anyway, these folders were annoying. I had applied turbosmooth so maybe that was it. Honestly this all by itself was an issue.
Apparently I had not been paying close enough attention when watching the modeling tutorials. I had missed the part where when the instructor went to edit something after applying turbosmooth, the specifically clicked back on the editable poly item in the modify list. This is really important, really important. It turns out if you don’t do this and then you try to make changes you can end up with an additional editable poly item and a really big mess. I suppose there may be advanced methods where this is exactly what you want to do. Trust me, for this, it was not. This is something I keep forgetting so I think I will have to have it tattooed on my brain, or the backside of my eyelids.
Back to the corners of the cup or better yet the lip of the bowl. What I decided to do was to take off the turbosmooth and have another look. I could see how the corners were sort of angled up in a bit of a bunch, sort of like a knot. Or like the corner on a hem of say a cloth napkin. My solution was to spend the time to adjust each of the vertices around the entire lip of the bowl to even everything out. I think I may even have removed an edge loop to make a bit more space for the existing loops that I had. It was tedious work and as I’m just getting started there may have been a better way of doing this. For now it gets the results I want.
So have a look at the cup and bowl together.
My plan is to create a small, salad plate and a larger dinner plate as well. I should be able to use the bowl to make the first one and then the small plate to make the larger one.