Let’s Get This Office Modeled.

Posted on January 2, 2015 by SusanG

After spending some time trying to work in my office the last couple of weeks, I’m ready to get it where it’s more functional. And now that I’ve finished up a couple of other projects, I’m diving back in to getting the office modeled.

Since I’m using stand-in shapes my furniture and other equipment in the office, there isn’t a lot of actual modeling to things. Though, there are some items that need a little modeling. Such as the chair and the monitors. All of which needed just a little work.

Office2014_1227a

The chair was created from 2 boxes. One box for the back and one for the seat. Then I made sure I had enough edge loops that I could line up all the edges. Then I removed any faces from each that would be touching when I went to attach the two objects. I’ve learned that trying to attach objects one face to another doesn’t work very well so my general solution is to remove those faces and then attach the objects. I did this. After the boxes were attached, I changed to wire frame mode and vertex selection so that I could weld the corresponding vertices to make the final object look seamless. With so many items starting to fill up the scene, I needed to be able to look at just what I was working on. I found the isolate selection option and the the end isolate option. These proved to be bit time savers as I didn’t have to keep hiding and un-hiding everything in the room, or even just the few
things that were in the way.

Office2014_1228b

I did pretty much the same thing with the monitors. The big difference being the placement of the two boxes to each other. I also made sure that they center point for each box was on the same x and y points. That helped to make sure it lined up nicely and correctly.

With the chair done and the monitors done it means I’ve finally finished off all the big furniture and have moved into creating the smaller items in the room. There was more computer equipment to account for, the keyboard, drawing tablet, the actual computer and all the equipment for my cable and cable modem and so on. So there were a lot of smaller items to model. Most of these items were just box shaped items. Though the trashcan was a cylinder. There was also the TV to model, which was handled the same as the monitors.

Everything was moved to it’s place as it was modeled. Otherwise the room would look much as it is likely to look when I start moving things around for real.Office2014_1228a

As you can see, I do have a lot of stuff in this room and most of it is on my desk.

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Wrapping up the Holiday Card 2014 Project

Posted on December 29, 2014 by SusanG

The Holiday Card 2014 is complete. I hope you enjoy it. I had fun with this one. Especially as I got towards the end and it all started coming together.

There were a couple of areas that required a lot of manual tweaking. They were areas where I couldn’t use large overall changes and I would have to move smaller bits such as edges and vertices one or two at a time to get the look and shape I wanted. I was able to find a shortcut or two that helped with all of that maunal tweaking.

Some of the shortcuts I was able to use that alleviated some of the work were things like creating only 4 palm leaves completely and then copying them and making some adjustments to make them a look a little different which added variety and yet not as much work. I was also able to short cut with the snow. Once I figured out how to do the snow I was then able to make a copy of the first one and then scale it to fit the next area on the tree, rotate it so a different view was facing forward on that level, and then make relatively minor adjustments to the shape.

The cool new thing that I figured out how to do could also be considered a shortcut. When I started to create the Santa’s hat I considered that I would have to do the main part of the hat in two pieces, the hat piece and the trim. I was able to figure out how to use just the one object and apply two materials to it so that I didn’t have to model those pieces individually and try to get them to fit together. That was a huge plus to me. And something
I will be using again.

There are many things I could have continued to add to this scene. The time constraint of wanting to have it ready for Christmas helped me to stay focused on the base theme and limit my additions, especially when I was able to see how much time I was actually getting to spend working on it. Given more time and better focus I might have added a few more things. Then again, there are a lot of parts of this scene that I can see using as a base to add to for another year.

I am really pleased with the way this came out. I was able to achieve the look and feel I envisioned. Cool!
Next…

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Holiday Card 2014

Posted on December 24, 2014 by SusanG

HolidayCard_2014

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Dressing up the Cactus

Posted on December 24, 2014 by SusanG

I’ve got the Christmas tree with snow, there are ornaments on the palm tree. Now, the cactus. I debated a bit on what to do here, more snow or a Santa’s hat. More snow would have been cute but visually boring, and I was a little over adding snow to this scene so I decided to go with the hat.

To make the Santa’s Hat I started with a cone with plenty of segments and for the height and also at the ends. I scaled it so it would fit just over the top of the cactus. Instead of using the ‘By Polygon’ selection though I chose to extrude using ‘Local Normal’ so that it was like adding thickness to the next to bottom row of polygons and make it look a bit like that fur edge around the hat. Of course when I added the turbosmooth modifier the
distinction was decreased quite a bit so a few edge loops were added to fix that. That way you can tell the hat from the trim.

That was the easy part. Well mostly. The fuzzy ball at the end was probably easier as that really only required proper sizing and location. Which weren’t too bad. Before I could do that though I had to get the hat just right. I knew I wanted the top to flop over and I sort of wanted the rest a bit squished in. However, I also wanted to get the project finished so I opted for minimal tweaking and shaping with the idea I can refine it as part of another project if I want.

I selected the very top end and deselected the extra edges I had lasso’d in and then I used the soft selection tool again so that I could rotate and adjust the hat end so that it looked a bit more relaxed and flopped over. I did some more minor and finer adjusting by decreasing the distance out that the soft selection tool was effective. This worked really well. I also used it to to a bit of squish or sag. Then I deformed the very end a little to look a little more relaxed and pointed. Then I added and moved the fuzzy ball into place.

So far so good, and no pictures yet.

With the hat modeled it was ready for texture. I found a really cool red velvet texture that I thought would work well so I use that and then I used another instance of it and removed the red bitmap from it and applied a white color to get the white trim. I had to adjust the scale of the bitmap so that it didn’t look clumpy. I had to do that for both the red and the white part of the trim. SO I’ve got my materials to apply but when I tried to apply it by polygon it didn’t work.

To get a material applied by polygon to an object required I set up material ID selections. So I selected the one set of polygons and then in the menu under material id’s I used the set id option and set one selection set to id channel 1. Then I selected the other set and set that selection set to chanel 2. Then I went into the material editor and assigned each of the materials to the correct material channel instead of applying them to the selected object and then they all showed up correctly. So while I wasn’t working on this project with the idea of adding to my skill set I still learned something new and very useful. I used the same white velvet material on the fuzzy ball on the hat. Then I grouped it all together so I could move it around as needed.HolidayCard_1221h

Looks pretty cool if I do say so.

One last thing before I take it to Photoshop to add my greeting. When I swapped the gold and green ornaments
around, I was asked if I could also maybe raise the ornament that was by the cactus up just a bit. Since there is
a palm leaf there just a little higher that I could hang the ornament off of I went ahead and moved it.

HolidayCard_1221i

Check back a bit later and I should have the final piece posted with the greeting.

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Time to Decorate

Posted on December 23, 2014 by SusanG

The Christmas tree has snow, now to dress up the palm tree. A few ornaments should brighten it up.

The nice thing about the ornaments for the palm tree is that because I just wanted the the round ball type ornaments, they were fairly easy to model. I chose to go with a basic approach in the shape since it fits better with the look of the rest of the scene. First I created a sphere to a relative size. Then I created a cylinder to act as the little metal bit that goes over the top where the hook is attached. I then chose to extrude the top interior ring of polygon faces up to make that bit of the ornament that goes in the metal bit. With that created, I scaled the cylinder to fit just over the extrusion and just around it. I had to do some scaling of the cylinder to get it just right. I applied the turbosmooth modifier to the sphere shape first and found that the definition between the extruded portion and the rest of the sphere was too soft and so I add a couple of edge loops to create a more defined corner. I applied the turbosmooth modifier to the cylinder as well and had to add a
few edge loop so that the top corner/edge was sharper as well as the bottom part.

With the ball and the topper part being two different objects it was fairly easy to apply materials to them. The trick was finding the right thing. I finally settled on a gold foil material. It was very shiny and a little washed out. But looks good so I kept it. For the HolidayCard_1221atopper I went with a basic titanium. I didn’t what it as shiny as the gold foil look and the titanium worked out nicely.

I also created a hook to hang the ornaments by. This helped immensely with making sure I got the placement right.

I created the hook from a cylinder with many more sections so I would have enough edges to properly curve the end.
Then I selected the very end and using the soft selection tool I rotated and moved the end to get the basic shape. I added another set or two of edge loops and selected the edge loops and adjusted those individually to get the shape I wanted. I put a zinc material on the hook so that it wasn’t shiny and was even a bit more dull and matte looking that the other two components. This got the first ornament created. To make the copy process easier I grouped all three items. That allowed me to select the group and move it or rotate it or whatever else I might need to do.

HolidayCard_1221b

I copied the ornament group and then opened it so I could change the color of the material on the ball part. In setting up the material, I could see where I could change the color, so first I did that and chose a lovely red. It looked great in the preview and not quite so awesome on the actual object, it was a bit faded or washed out. I found a setting in the material that let me adjust the color saturation versus the texture so I was able to get a HolidayCard_1221c
deeper red on the ball. It didn’t look quite right where I put it so I moved the red ball up higher in the leaves where it supplied some contrast to all the green.

HolidayCard_1221d

 

 

 

One more ornament to add and make it green. And this should do. However, it was pointed out to me that where I had the green ornament, it got lost in all the green of the palm leaves and the cactus.

 

So I swapped the green and gold ornaments around to make it easier to see each of them.

HolidayCard_1221g

That gets the palm tree decorated.

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