modeling issue

 From:  Michael Gibson
3183.5 In reply to 3183.3 
Hi Oskar, here's an attempt:





To start with I went to the Front view and drew in 3 rectangles with the "Rounded" option enabled, and I made the round take up as much space as possible to make them into lozenge type shapes:



Then I went to the 3D view and dragged them apart to separate them (make sure Straight Snap is on):



Then a Loft to build a surface:



At this point you would do quite a bit of fiddling with editing the curves to scale them or move them forward or back a bit until you would be satisified with the loft shape.

So that builds the main body part.. I then hid those curves. Your shoulder part seems to be quite sphere-like so I decided to actually use a piece of a sphere there. To do that I selected these edges:



Then Construct > Revolve, set Angle: 90 degrees option before picking the axis points:



Mirror that sphere piece to the other side, then select these edges:



And then Construct / Extrude to build the center part:



So now you've got the basic piece but the issue is that there is a kind of crease where the sphere and loft touch each other. Normally when you have a sharp crease you use Fillet to round it, but Fillet will tend to have difficulty and fail in places where the crease is at a shallow angle where it is actually not that far off from being tangent (like say 20 degrees or less). Also the fillet in such things will be a very small area and may not give you the kind of broader transition that you would want.

What you would really probably want at this point is a surface matching tool that would reshape the loft so that it was smooth to the end part, but MoI does not have that tool yet.

So anyway, I figured I would put some blends in here. So as a first step I decided to start the shape going straight off the sphere pieces rather than trying to do a blend directly to the spheres, which because the spheres are curved fairly tightly it is going to have more of an effect on the blend making it kind of more wavy than you would want. So I moved the end pieces over some:



And extruded the edges there to get a really straight section going:



So now to blend this - often times you want to let blend have some area to work in, if you give it a small zone that will generally tend to make the blend rather tightly curved itself which will be more apparent in the shape of the result. It can be small if the pieces are really very close to being aligned to one another though.

So I drew in a line a ways back here:



And used it to cut that piece off, so in this will be the zone that Blend will fill in. Also at this point I decided to delete the bottom half and mirror it later.

Some of these decisions came after experimenting with a few different varieties of how much space to put in there. This is where things kind of get fiddly and more difficult to judge what to do without experience. When you use NURBS modeling to build things that are driven off of 2d plan views, it doesn't take anywhere near as much experience because it is just more obvious to use the 2d curves directly...



So then some Blends between these pieces, adjusting the Bulge down slightly:



Then the top is pretty darn flat, so I just selected the 4 curves and used Construct / Network to fill in a surface to that 4-sided boundary.



Then mirror that whole thing to get the bottom part.


For the cube I drew in a box, filleted the vertical edges, went to the side view and rotated it, then draw a line along one of those edges, moved the line to the side and used perp/perp snap to find the spot on the arc that was closest to that angled line for where to place the box (see http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3042.14 for a demo of perp/perp), then boolean union, then Fillet the bottom.


Anyway, it's kind of getting into the more arcane and fiddly aspects of NURBS modeling, that's why it's a more difficult area to jump into.


When your shapes don't have very distinct edges to them and are rounded and semi-melted looking all over the place, those are usually indications that you could get a better result with sub-d modeling tools for that rather than profile-driven drawing tools like MoI has put as more of a priority so far within it.

- Michael

EDITED: 22 Dec 2009 by MICHAEL GIBSON