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Modelling holes / pipes into curving surfaces.


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I'm trying to model the main body of this compressor. It has an irregular form so I opted for the loft technique, as you can see. Not perfect but OK I guess. The box modelling technique was not very successful. I'm also trying to model the pipes sticking out, and this is a real challenge because they are kind of at an angle so it makes it difficult to model a n-Side from that. 

 

Any suggestion how I can easily model this ?  I know for some of you guys this is routine stuff. 

 

Thanks.

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Moved to correct section. This is not a hard surface object (despite its obviously hard surfaces !) because SDS is involved.

 

Hmmmm. That loft isn't helping you as much as you might imagine in its current state, because it has produced a mesh that is quite uneven in topology around its circumference (lots of elongated rectangular polys), and not dense enough to be able to cut circles into without affecting or indeed ruining your surface curvature under SDS without rather extreme reparative measures like the shrink-wrap method for example. It's also got wonky edge loops from bottom to top, which twist in a way that may come back to haunt you later, especially texture-wise if UVs become important. The loft also gives you unhelpful caps you have to later repair, although you can at least bin those off, and do your own nice quad ones 🙂.

 

There is an argument for not making the tubular bits connect to the body at all of course - as each one seems to have a cylindrical shroud / mounting bezel where it meets the body of the main object, you could just butt-join or even intersect those with it, having deformed them to match the curvature first (I'd do mirrored bends for that), and it would probably look continuous to any camera that wasn't incredibly close to it...

 

But if we do want the pipes as part of the main mesh, the best move you could make with your current setup would be to adjust your loft divisions to be a) lower resolution, and b) more evenly square, which will provide superior topology for cutting holes into. The smoothest results under SDS will come from using just 8 points in your holes  / pipes.

 

image.png.78c324745169835e644fd912ce91ec87.png

 

So here I have modelled in 2 holes (to which you could stitch and sow some separately built pipe sections) to that sort of general shape, in close proximity to each other , and with overlapping edge flows to ramp the difficulty up a bit 🙂 But notice how even everything is, and how much less variation / stretch there is in poly size around the holes than in your version. However, if we're really 'going for gold' there is still some minimal SDS lumpiness remaining that becomes apparent when the lines aren't there, which we could fix by shrink-wrapping this mesh (or better still the SDS result) around a high res SDS copy...

 

Wolf 3D has an excellent video about that technique if you need the specifics...

 

This all leads to excellent holes, pipe joins and bezels...

 

image.png.f3c60a8df2c1fbe6bfb61eae163aad0b.png

 

CBR

 

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