Cerbera

Yes you will find that all the tools we have for creating thickness in R25 will fail on such a mesh, for reasons that are very complicated to explain. I would use Manual Extrude to get a result close to what you need, then there will be some further manual adjustment necessary of groups of edges to get the result you are expecting. I have long lobbied Maxon for a proper Shell Tool, and have my hopes that one may appear at some point, but in the meantime we don't have any automatic ways of dealing with these challenging surfaces I'm afraid. CBR

In your second shot you have in fact selected all the points along the centreline of the FFD, which is what you want. That is merely difficult to see because you don't have your HUD setup properly to show you component selection counts etc... Continue by resetting your modelling axis to 0, 0,0 and then use the scale tool to scale from centre of those points. I do specifically explain what spinners are above ! CBR

There are a few different ways of approaching this, but I wouldn't manually model this if there was any automatic way. And of course there are... It could be as simple as inverting a max poly landscape object initially, as I have done quickly below... But my favourite I think would be booling 2 landscapes together to get most of the indentation sorted in one hit whilst keeping both element separately controllable. You can Z-Remesh that afterwards to get decent topology... only a couple of 'traps' in that approach; firstly, Booles work with closed meshes, which Landscape primitives are not, so having altered the parameters and got it look as you need you can make them editable with C and then use Close poly hole to cap in the bases with a giant ngon. (Yes ngons are bad, but this is a fart in a hurricane when booles are involved, so it doesn't matter !) and then booles will work as expected, though they may take a very long time to calculate, and are subject to various anomolies and aberrations that sometimes cause problems. Might be worth checking out Volume Builder as an alternative. In the example below I have booled an inverted landscape into a heavily segmented cube and remeshed the result. For higher detail like in your photo you will need many more polys in both objects than I have below, which can strain remesher and boole routines if not careful, and can lock up your machine if given ridiculous values, so be aware of that ! However that is a very simplistic example to show you a general principal. In all probability a Landscape object will not have enough options in its surface attributes for you to get precisely the shapes and contours you need in the hole. And so I suggest you make one a better way via a 1000 x 1000 Plane with a multi layered noise-driven displacer deformer doing all the height mapping, which let you get a lot more art directable landscaping. BUT, because we need a solid object, we might as well displace a cube instead (high segment values in XZ only), and use a field falloff so we get a solid bool-able object at the end. As far as which noises and combinations of layers and effects give the nicest terrains, there is a good Eric Smit tutorial on that here. When finished making those you just need to Current State to Object the mesh to bake down the displacer and you have a boolable mesh hopefully... Other approaches might include doing the whole landscape, including the hole, with material displacement where you can use sub-poly displacement via the material to get even more resolution and detail. Or using Voronoi Fracture to actually crumble away part of a solid. After that is mainly about scattering a few rocks and bit of debris around the perimeter (scatter tool / cloner etc) to generally enhance the crater-like look... CBR

Nonetheless the information you are being given is correct ! If you want scale numbers to stick when you enter them in co-ords manager you have to be in Object mode. In Model mode the transform is applied, but the scale correctly reverts to 1 because that is the new true size of the object at the new 100% scale. CBR

Ah Ok, you have the wrong thing selected - the object, not the FFD. Select the FFD and then the points you want to change within that rather than directly on the model as you are doing now... However, even when you have the right points selected, the axis will still not be in the centre, because you have previously moved it elsewhere using the modelling axis attributes, which are currently like so... Reset X, Y and Z to 0 (by right clicking the spinners - the little arrows that appear when you hover over the value) and you'll be scaling from centre again. CBR

Yeah, tricky one that. I am still thinking about it also ! 🙂 CBR

Also - hold control subtracts from selection as shift adds to it ! CBR

Yeah, after a while you get a feel for which flows are going to work and give you the right transitions, but even now I still find I am wrong the first time occasionally. I guess it's the knowing what to change to fix it that is where the real XP comes in... mainly it's all about where you put the 5 point poles and making sure they are conducive rather than obstructive to the transition(s). This becomes more complex when there is more than 1 transition going on in the same area, or where these subtleties are difficult to see. Of course it is very hard to massively accurately match curves if you don't have ideal reference, or the physical object, and so far we have just 1 usable front view from OP and have to rather eyeball the rest... CBR

Edge weighting is certainly an option but I don't think we'll need it here. From what I can see of the model (and I think I can see most of the curvature between sections) SDS, and the depth itself will handle a lot of those transitions, and our underlying mesh can remain quite simple, at least until we have to start adding handles holes and whatnot... I may have to spin some edges if I find that my transition curves aren't doing what I think they should, but I think we can persuade SDS to do the right thing... CBR

...and for quickly fleshing out stuff to retopologize over later, which is how I am using it right now for a client while we prototype and refine the design of a Golf Driver... in some ways we are finding that a CAD program would be quicker to make changes in, but we appreciate the true perspective 3D view as we design, and recent improvements to speed and caching of VB make it a very usable workflow, even at ridiculously low voxel sizes, and dealing with 10s of millions of polys and fully procedural setups. In that respect it gets an A* from me, even though it can't quite replicate the zen joy of actual poly-pushing... CBR

Yep, no chance of solving that without scene. CBR

They will notice when they want to UV the result and none of the loops are conducive to that. Even with ZRM there is no guarantee material breaks will be anything close to what you need, and then you have to deal with what might be described as a 'hurricane of piss' trying to transfer usable UVs to that mesh, which is possible but only with time and wizardry. People are quick to dismiss SDS and doing it properly when it's all about the client speed, but don't forget that what the client sees is only half the battle. A lot of them are going to want subdividable meshes, usable UVs, helpful selection tags, and edge flows that make sense, whether they know it or not, because it'll be you they come back to when they want changes. And when they do, you'll end up having to redo all the textures and edge flow stuff even if the VB underneath it all is fully parametric. And let's not forget that the more often you do SDS modelling, and get used to solving, patching, tweaking and expanding such that it becomes second nature, then we start to achieve speeds that really aren't that far behind bodging it with a voxels or splines. For your own benefit you would also be practicing skills that not many people have any more, which makes you valuable for the people who still need it, which is more than you think ! 😉 CBR

Ok, so the broad strokes... 1. I would start with the front flat part, and start with a few low poly discs to get round the corners nice and evenly... 2. Next step would be to join those, remove the bits we don't want, get a gloriously even perimeter, and patch the inside, thusly... Of course this shape could be described with less polygons than that, but we need to think about the density needed elsewhere, and the subsequent connection of these so far disparate patches, so I have gone a little higher than is strictly necessary out of context. 3. Next we can leave that patch, and start the handle, which needs slightly more polygon density on the right hand side, like so, or thereabouts... as this is isolated topology there is no need to match segmentation left and right sides, but left side should match the patch to the left, and right side should be a line down the centre of every 'hole'. We do not need more than that now because we will be using staged subdivision on all patches when we need it, later, to put the holes in. 4. Last in the patching department would be to make the neck, which we will do with auto-projection and poly pen in order to give us the edge flow we want whilst still maintaining a perfectly cylindrical front half that the neck demands. Eventually this will become symmetrized, so we are still only building 1 half initially. Your reprojection form can be just a cylinder (no caps), under SDS with the base mesh tweaked to follow the subtle curvature there. Here is mine before I start laying down the loops we'll actually use... ..and here is the patch I need, created over the top of that with poly pen... that needs quite a specific edge flow, which is probably the below, or something quite like it... That patch has used projection, so will be rounded correctly, but most importantly, whilst still having all the right edge flow and segmentation to join to the adjacent patches it will later connect to. 5. Now we can start moving those patches around in 3D space to get the depths right before we begin expanding, and joining them, and adding depth and detail to handle and neck etc. Hopefully that is enough to push you off in the right direction, and I have other work to do today, but will pop back later / tomorrow to add more if you need it... CBR

Lols... Well I mustn't do thread derailment, but as you asked so nicely... Looks kinda cool at night as well, where we can do proper 'mid-life-crisis' style Tron cosplay as well 🙂 I'm sort of going for the Sith Holocron look. Please don't tell anyone that machine can go at 112 kph !! If you would like to know more, that's a highly customised Begode Master, and people riding them look like this... CBR

Well this is what happens when budgets top the billion dollar mark and you got 10 years to make a thing... if I was working like that I'd want every drop perfect too ! CBR

Not that I am hugely aware of - I was more just reaching around for reasons people might not do trad modelling so much any more ! I'm certainly still doing it, and still enjoying it ! Lols - yes there may be things to hear in a month or 2... just seeing if an idea has got (orchestral) legs ! CBR

Despite all the fabulous and fast new methods Cinema offers, traditional SDS modelling will still produce the nicest and most usable result here. I can certainly help with that if you are struggling, either with general pointers and advice or step-by-step over skype if you would prefer a high-detail in-depth version... the latter can't be free alas, but is there as an option if you would like it... please pm me if so... CBR

First couple of months of the year are pretty dead 3D-wise I find, so things do go a bit quieter then. I haven't been around so much recently because of musical projects, and it's the season for electric unicycle touring so I have been out a lot more than usual. But when I have popped in I don't find many modelling questions these days to answer ! I am beginning to think that either nobody does modelling any more, or that AI / procedurals / nodes are doing it for everyone already ! CBR

What ?! I've got a wicked colour scheme going on perfect for me that only took like 3 key changes ! CBR

No I think the dual colour schemes were abandoned some time ago. But we do still have the flexibility to change nearly every aspect of the application in prefs of course...

I finally saw the movie last Friday ! Thought I'd fall asleep / be uninterested in plot despite amazing visuals, but no, Mr Cameron had my eyes locked to the screen for the entire 3 hr 20 duration !

I like to drag my Structure manager back where it used to be, as a tab next to layers. Always useful to have that around whilst modelling - it is unique in its ability to identify and find ngons, tris etc etc, which might not be identified in Mesh Checker. CBR

Shouldn't matter. Bump is independent of geo. CBR

I also have this issue, albeit rarely. I do have a 3D Connexion Space Mouse. But Cinema can take a while to fully quit even when it does clear eventually - sometimes I have to wait about 30 seconds after Cinema shutdown before, for example, I can install a new version without it noticing it is still running. CBR

Welcome to the Core 🙂 Please complete your profile so we know which platform you are running this on - makes a difference to some questions. That shouldn't take very long - on mine it is just a few seconds. It cannot be turned off as far as I know - it is to do with optimizing the Asset Browser. CBR