EAlexander

@Igor Here's some thoughts on improving renders that I tell my students: There is no substitute to education as spending time in the software. You just need to build and render as many scenes as possible. Every days and quick studies have been instrumental in my learning - and a lot of them fail or never see the light of social media, but I still learn tons from them. It takes a lot of time - learning the software is only part of the journey. Lighting is key - beautiful topology and hyper real materials will all be useless if the lighting is off or bad. This is the number one thing I see in renderings that need improvement. Imitation is the best way to learn at first. Too many people try to take on learning 3d or improving 3d and being a designer/photographer/stylist all at the same time. I suggest that you find photos that you like and try to reproduce them. This way you have a specific lighting goal in mind as well as architecture or design choices are minimized and you can focus on your craft. Later, you can design it all, but while learning - only take on one thing at a time. See attached - I still do this regularly to try and improve. I take liberties and change things around a bit, but the general look and feel vibe is already established. This is key. (this might be a great challenge too - post a photo and see if beginners can try to reproduce it. I have my students do this with modern kitchens.) Keeping in mind that I teach film and stage designers how to render - I think one should look to film lighting as the inspiration for making images. I think people get too tripped up in trying to be mathematically photo real, so if the sun is at this level and the window is this tall and the light should hit the wall here and then it should look real.... This is not how photographers and cinematographers work. No photographer for Architectural Digest goes on a shoot without a full set of lighting equipment. If you study film lighting, you will see that the proximity and the scale of lighting in film (HUGE) is used, even when subtle realism is involved. So I say study film lighting more in depth. See attached examples and take a look at: http://mattscottvisuals.com/lighting - a great resource that shows the lighting layout for advertising shots. There are lots of Instagram sites dedicated to film lighting and BTS setups like @filmlights and others. Subscribe to these and study the rigs. Hope that helps some - always happy to share my settings and lighting setups for any images I post if folks are curious. -evan

Looking good in here!

Nice work! That atmosphere break with sparks is 🔥🔥🔥

Night.

You can do it! Thank you.

More architectural work. Day.

Looking good @Igor. Is this modeling in Houdini?

04.22 Interior

Yes, this looks cool! Great idea and I love the subject matter!

Very excited for S2!!

More modeling practice: The Katakana Chair designed by Sean Dare @ Dare Studios.. Thanks goes out to Cerbera and Igor on this one - take a look at this thread where they help me sort out how to tackle this chair in SubD. Thanks guys - it's not perfect, but a huge leap forward for me in understanding.

Oh exciting....

Here's the final - thanks guys - I have learned so much in the last few hours. Really great stuff. Not as Clean as yours, but a huge improvement in understanding. A bit more to do on this with Seams and I might take on UV with this, but I want to keep going on modeling, so maybe another chair model first. Thanks again!

Haha - UVs too - I haven't gotten there yet. But thank you thank you thank you both!

Yes - that's it and That is what Igor's video shows as well. Phew - so much to learn. Thanks fellas!

Perhaps this is just DISPLAY>ISOPARMS instead of DISPLAY>WIRES? for the viewport?

Diving into this again - thanks again for all the time and help. This is information one just can't easily find elsewhere. I followed CBRs layout almost exactly. I followed Igor's method for the curved back corner, where I extruded the center back from the side to centerline and then beveled the corner to get the rounding. No problem. my question comes from how the SDS reacts to the base geo where my results look different then Cerbera's and I don't understand why: Grab 01 is the raw mesh in Symmetry Grab 02 is with the SDS applied at Level 01 - I get a central edge (which makes sense with Sub 01, but Cerbera's doesn't have this. Also - his legs are equally subdivided, and I just get three - so are they additional loops added in on these long flat polys? Grab 03 compares my leg connection to Cerbera's and while I thought our base geo was the same, his Flow looks much cleaner then mine and I'm not clear why? Grab 04 is just Cerbera's clean model for reference. Thanks - sorry to ask so many piddily little questions, but I feel like understanding how to predict the SDS will make building the base geo much easier and I don't fully grok what it's currently doing. e.

Thank you Igor - yes indeed - this Community rocks. Thank you for the file - studying it now.

This thread rules.

Also, really stunning work Cerbera! The benchmark for sure.

Thank you Igor and Jay. This is amazingly helpful. Philosophicaly speaking, how do you know to lay out the left side like this? How do you know to do three cuts near the top of the back? Why are the lines that flank the middle leg angled in towards the leg? How did you get from a flat side into the curving back? And what I really don't get is how you can have your radial quads so evenly spaced while keeping the top angle so perfect? Are you sliding points and edges in clone mode? I have a ton more questions but I'll stop there and study this a bit more. Thank you, this gives me a lot to think about.

For my next trick, I thought I'd try to model this chair - and I though - that will be easy. Hmmmm. This is where my lack of proper Sub D training really shows. I've tried a few different approaches to start and they are all failing in one way or another. I thought I'd start with one arm piece and then throw that into symmetry and then build the back to connect them, before getting to the legs and seat. This wasn't great, so I started with a cube, but ran into trouble with the curves down as the legs start. I am unclear as to how to best approach/start. The fact that things wrap around and tilt down at the same time, while being routed with round over is what messes with my head. I have decent wireframes of front/side/top views and I started by drawing the arm with the Polygon pen in top view and extrude up and then tweak points. But when I get to the curves and round-overs where the arms transition into the legs - things start to fall apart. I've looked at wireframes of this chair on turbo squid for inspiration, but I see a few different approaches and none super clean. I realize this is a broad question and I want to learn and am willing to do the work, but I'd love a few thoughts on how you would approach an object like this and where to start. Attaching a few pictures for reference. Thanks for your time.

Thanks Igor! Curious to hear what you have planned.....

More Sub D practice. It's still dense and lots of mistakes, but each one gets better, so I just need lots of practice. All quads though, just too many of them 🙂