Cerbera

No, that's not gonna work. Those meshes have nothing in common, which would make them un-morphable via that method. Pose Morph, in this context, only works on meshes with identical point counts and orders. It is further doomed to failure by the terrible geometry and resulting ngons usually present in spline based lettering. Morphing between utterly disparate models is very hard for any DCC to deal with - most don't have any native way of doing it, and this is true for Cinema as well to a large extent. That is not to say you can't find inventive ways around this if you are prepared to accept some restrictions / changes though. For example you can use a cloner and inheritance to morph a load of particles / clones from one base formation to another, and then source and target meshes don't need to be the same at all. You can use Pose morph with a spline (but NOT use a different unrelated spline to morph to) and use that inside a generator like a loft for example - you can get quite convincing morphs that way, but even then you need to move the individual points in a way that they don't cross each other and intersect during the morph. CBR

Had a bit of spare time today so made the headband quickly to check my previous advice was correct. And indeed we can start this with a cube or, as I did in the end, a simple 8 sided cylinder. Again, could have gone 2 way symmetry if wanted, but only went with 1 as I don't like having symmetry along the centre of tubes. Edge flow fairly simple and predictable, and whilst initially built straight, 'tuning fork stylee', a bend deformer curved that in to meet in the middle. So next we need to decide what to do with the mesh bit inside this, and I delayed this decision til later, but knocked up a base mesh for it that could be equally useful as a base for material meshing, or as an object to deform any actual modelled meshing around. I actually recommend you don't try and make that meshing - it is ridiculously hard to model, and massively painstaking for a result that would be only about 5% better than doing it with materials and bump / normal mapping. So that's just a sliced Capsule, cut in half, FFD to make it match the reference curvature, quadrifed at the ends, and bend deformed so it fits with the rest of it. No need to add thickness yet until we decide what to do with it ! Together with the chrome ends, which are just rounded cylinders and ball joints, that comes together to gives us this for the headband... CBR

Here's what I'd do when you get to that volume knob... Again, 2 way symmetry means we only have to make quarter of it, which is what I did, but you could equally get a 60 sided cylinder, delete all but 1 segment of that, and then array it back into the complete form for ultimate time saving. Other than that, it's a basic inset, extrude back, and control loops. This shows a decent alternative way to close a circular section with many segments, collapsing them in as they get near centre reducing from 60 edges to 20 which can be solved to quads with minimum complex poles, not that they matter here anyway, because it's flat. CBR

I don't have Arnold either, but on checking the manual I see that no indeed, Cinemas deformers are not supported at all by that system - only effectors. So, yes, you're gonna have to bake any animation in by the looks of it. CBR

Yep, me too - hardly any clients give a damn what qualification you might or might not have in this - you are as valuable to them as your portfolio / last render demonstrates ! ALL my client modelling work comes from word of mouth, and not once has anyone ever asked what my qualifications are, over and above 15 years in this software ! Another option is some good quality 1-1 remote tutition, like the kind I just so happen to offer for example ! 😉 Some people entering this industry find it very helpful to have a very experienced, ongoing 'mentor' type person on hand, to solve all your problems for you, and help you directly over any specific hurdles you encounter, as well as being there to give you a slow, staged, cumulative understanding of all major areas of this immense software via 1-1 remote screen sharing. This avoids having to build up knowledge in the very slow and protracted way from a series of disparate free tutorials of widely varying standards, some of which may contradict each other, or leave questions unanswered. That has a lot of advantages over group lessons, or uni courses, because not only are you getting 1-1 attention ALL THE TIME, but also because your lessons can be tailored specifically to what YOU alone want, in the order you want it, or that would be most helpful to you and your plans. Once the basics are out of the way you can set a balance between more theory-led lessons and project based learning. Just a thought, but I don't often have ongoing tuition spaces free, and you happen to catch me at a time when I do, so thought I'd mention it ! If interested feel free to PM me for more info. CBR

Yes. You never should have built that body part, because now its topology is unrelated to the thing it needs to join to ! So in the bin it goes, and we will create the rest of that white plastic part out of the bit we already have, by selecting its perimeter loop and ctrl scaling out before moving that edge forwards to start to form the shape of that indent... Then we shall rinse and repeat a few times to get the rest of the form, then add our control loops, then add extra loops to account for the extra cut-outs on the side etc... This should show you what loops are needed where... Note: As the perimeter of this section is hidden behind the rim of the rose gold outers I haven't been too careful to prettify it, but as long as it intersects cleanly, and the rim has that extra centreline loop from which you will create the magnet holes you should be good... Talking of which we don't ever want to have insets (for magnet holes) directly on borders, so get your control loops in for this rim BEFORE you do them, which isolates the insets from the edges, where they would screw with our nice clean borders were that not the case. CBR

While I am up with pesky insomnia I will go ahead and show you how to make the inner white plastic part of the main shells... First get yourself one of these... Then, Honeycomb array Clone that, sort of like this... (10 x 9 rows rather than the 10 x 7 shown below; you actually need 6 holes at the widest point). When you have that right, you can make the cloner editable, off the copies we don't want, and then put the rest in a connect to join them. Make that editable too, and then delete all but one quarter of it like so, and restore 2 way symmetry, which makes the next bit lots quicker... We'll also need a perimeter loop for this section, so create a very even one like I have with exactly the right amount of segments to join to the inner array. And then we just need to play 'connect the meshes', and relax (Iron / brush smooth) the polys we create between these to make a very even, regular flat mesh. In case you wonder, we don't have to care about the minorly complex 6 point poles here because this part of the surface is entirely planar. This one will not be getting staged subdiv, so we can use control loops here (outlining the holes) and for the next bit, adding depth to this piece.... CBR

Sure... AirpodMax CBR 01.c4d CBR

Be led by the reference. From what limited reference I have seen of that part they are fairly even, and mine are so because I scaled loops in on Y and X separately so that they were. Also I should check you are not building the white bit out of the same mesh as the rose pink bit. They are separate parts in the real world, and should be like that in the model as well, as we need radically different topology there. You can leave the outer mesh open - it doesn't even need thickness as it will be fully obscured by the other part(s). Also, when you are working with staged subdivision, don't add control loops to the base mesh, as these too will get doubled in density by the subdivide, and then you'll have to go around dissolving half of them. If you look closely at reference, you'll see the curves on the inner rim of this object are incredibly smooth, and don't actually require control loops (except in one place), because the density of the polys in that area is enough to define the surface curvature alone. CBR

Pls upload scene file. Need to see a lot more than what you are showing us... CBR

So, if we continue that round the back, we can finish off the base mesh for that bit, with equally few polys, like so... Now, of course that isn't enough mesh resolution to add the smaller holes and details, so next we apply 1 or 2 levels of subdivision to get perfectly even geo, again, without having to move anything ! This is called 'establishing curvature'; baking an initial level of subdivision into the mesh which allows us to continue with the smaller details. So having checked that for ultimate smoothness of curvature with a soft metal texture... ...here's the same mesh, but now with L1 SDS applied, which is eminently more suitable for making those holes at the top, which is presumably the next stage of this bit. I am also down to 1 way symmetry now, as the bottom of these cups is slightly longer / more rounded than the tops. CBR

That is more polys than you need. You can lose the ones either side of the horizontal centreline I reckon. Or, use the double symmetry as recommended, in which case, the starter points you need are simply these, which I got from a 4 x 4 plane I then deleted most of !! ...which in symmetry(s) and SDS give you this, with just 4 polys ! Now you can just slightly move the centre poly out a bit to get the most perfect curved surface there... Now we can make SDS do all the work, and redirect the edge flow, by just dragging a copy of the perimeter loop back a bit to get this... Look how magnificently smooth and even it is, with almost zero effort - I have moved just 1 poly ! Such is the power of JUST ENOUGH polys to describe the form. Continue, in that vein ! 🙂 CBR

That certainly would produce a very even curve there. Bend deformer seems ideal, moreso if it was made under symmetry. CBR

Look at it from ALONG the surface, and the reason for lumpiness will become apparent. Here's my version, doing the same thing. With your eye, follow each individual loop, and see how nice a curve you have along it. If a curve is flowing generally in an upward arc, look for any rogue points that break that continuity, and adjust them so they don't ! Then check the same in the loops flowing in the opposite direction. If you don't have nice curves, lumps will start to show. My one below isn't perfect, but it is close enough to it to produce an A* surface under subdivision. This way we minimize the work SDS has to do, and so it doesn't fight us... Also note, I am able to get the same shape with fewer polygons, and that is helping me maintain those nice contiguous curves without having many points to edit - were we working in double symmetry, this would be even less points to wrangle ! CBR

This is what that could look like... CBR

No, they are already quads, they just need to be even. Brush smooth would also do it, or you can manually slide points around. CBR

Yes, that's because the polys are quite unevenly spaced. You haven't yet done the tweaking / relaxing stage that would beautify this surface. HB modelling bundle HB relax would help here, as would brush smoothing that centre section. CBR

CBR

Excellent. The way to use 2 projections in a single material is what's behind most of UV Edit. There you select groups of polygons, and project them in a way that produces the least distortion when unwrapped flat. A cone is a particularly difficult thing to decide how to unwrap because of the pointy nature of it. Cinema's decision to do the cone cylindrically and the base flat is probably the most common way the islands would be usefully split but you could use UV Edit to project the cone polys from top-down, which would give you this sort of layout instead... ..which would produce horrible distorted UVs until you selected these seams, and cut along them to relax it to this... Now, that is considerably more even than the default way it gets unwrapped, but some people don't like it because they prefer their UVs to follow the flow of the polygons - depends what is most helpful to the final form in question... Oh, you can't relax stuff because you are probably unaware of a small issue (reported) in the Cone primitive where its points at the tip are not welded by default, so you need to select those and optimize before any relax operation will work. CBR

After closer inspection, that pads mesh is this... Very easy to make modelled with a cloner, but much more poly efficient, and even easier to create via material I would have thought. "Some cloned stitching, earlier" CBR

A I would do with regular staged subdivision surfaces (model low poly initially, then subdivide by 2 to get enough baked in resolution to get the LED and socket details. B depends on if you want actual holes. If you do I would start with that bit (cloner / honeycomb array etc) and work out from there, again SDS. C has SDS written all over it - you could start that with merely a cube under symmetry (SDS would get you the rounding) D - Meshwork 1 (presuming you don't want to do it with material alpha) should be made flat (I can't get close enough to it to see what the weave is specifically), then deformed that to the shape required (FFD / various deformers). E - Larger meshing - as above, and possibly even the same mesh rig as you used before, but scaled up, and re-conformed to the new shape. The most challenging part is the inside holey bit - at least you are helped here by 2 way symmetry, but nothing here is too complicated as long as your game plan is solid, you are careful with edge flow and quads on the bits where it counts, and you know how to make mesh ! I can elaborate on that further if needed. CBR

You're welcome. But 27 posts in and I notice you still haven't completed your profile. Showing you how to unwrap stuff depends entirely on us knowing which version you have, so I will be able answer this when that profile is complete. CBR

The default Cone object (R25) already has UVs split into a flat base and cylindrical rest of it... So all you have to do is make it editable, then pack the UVs to rearrange the islands with no overlap as above... CBR

I would guess you don't have deformed editing enabled (view settings). CBR