This week has been a little odd. The schedule is all off because I have been taking a class for my job, and so many things to do. I keep running out of day. For a while I was a little concerned that I would not have an opportunity to work on the logo re-do. I was finally able to find a break in things so I could work on it.
As you can see though, I have not gotten that much farther. I got the last piece for the Pen end created and in place. You can just see it here.
I suppose the question for some is why bother with such a small piece. Honestly, it has to do with scalability. If I leave the piece out and I make the logo really big, it will look a bit incomplete. So by including it, it doesn’t matter the size. If it’s really small and you can barely see it, that is ok.
In addition to getting the last piece on the pen end completed, I started on the pencil end. One thing to note about this is that the cylinders I used on the Pen section were all of 18 sides to make them really round and smooth. For the pencil side I wanted it to look really like a pencil so this cylinder is only created with 6 sides. When I created it, I noted that I had left the smooth selection checked. This is important because when I first created it, even with just 6 sides it was displaying completely round. I added some edge loops to tighten the angles at the each segment and that helped with the hexagonal shape. And now it doesn’t look so rounded.
(Don’t ask what I’m going to do to transition the two cylinders. I haven’t figured that out yet.)
The edge loops with this were a little trickier than I expected. At first, I thought the edge loops were doing what I wanted, then they started behaving strangely. I wanted one on each side of the angle edges and I figured it only really needed to go to the center point
on the end. The first one didn’t, it went to the edge of the inner ‘circle’ on the end. A couple of the edge loops did this. The next edge loop tried to go all the way around an pick up one of the other angles. So I went with it. Still I thought it was weird. Once I had them all in I thought the ones that only went to the inner edge were wrong so I removed them. But when I tried to put them back they did the same thing.
When I looked closer at how 3ds Max handled those edge loops, it turned out they were the best solution. 3ds Max optimized to create quads where ever it could. That meant that some loops went all the way around and some only went to a certain edge.
Next, I need to figure out how I want to create the sharpened pencil look. Since this project is all about UVs I might just pull the point out from the end of the pencil instead of creating a cone and trying to integrate it with the body.