Full Version: Let's Model a Car: A Tutorial

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Hello ed,

Great tutorial, excellent work.

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French translation done! :)
http://moiscript.weebly.com/la-voiture-de-ed.html

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Thank you Pilou! That must have taken some time. And you have nice shadows for the images.

Ed Ferguson

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@ Ed
Thx to you for a so detailed tutorial!
Now it will help more easily also some Frenchies people! ;)

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After a bit of experimentation I have found that I can edit the smoothing of individual parts of the model in the vertex modelling room of Carrara. While I suppose it all adds to my knowledge base its a tedious process. I gave Keyshot a try and the results are about a 100 times better without any fiddling about.







Thanks both for your help:)

Image Attachments:
Capture.PNG 

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Hi Keith, well that's a shame that they've made it more difficult to bring in CAD data into Carrara without jumping through some hoops. I'm fairly sure that in previous versions of Carrara there were no special steps needed, it just used the vertex normals that were provided in the file like you'd expect and like most programs do.

Just for my future reference in case someone else asks about it, where exactly do you go in the vertex room interface to enable the original imported vertex normals to be used?

- Michael

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Hi

The edges that need to be smoothed appear as blue lines. When selected they turn yellow, as opposed to blue for any other part of the mesh.





Once highlighted select Smooth Edges from the model menu and use the default setting.




This is the result:

Before


After




I imported a ready made DAZ model that dates from 2007 and either it was not as well made as I remember or it came with some ragged parts. Maybe I'm being a perfectionist?



I don't suppose anyone has a method of fixing the problem before importing teh obj to Carrara such as a script of a work around involving passing the file through another program? I tried passing it through Hexagon with no luck.

Best regards
Keith

Image Attachments:
Blue.PNG  Capture1.PNG  enue.PNG  Smoothed.PNG  wheel.PNG  wheel.PNG 

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Hi Keith,

> Once highlighted select Smooth Edges from the model menu and use the default setting.

Hmmm, I think that's probably just going to modify how the newly created normals are generated so at least it won't have a hard break in those spots.

What you really want to have is the "break angle" normals creating mechanism totally turned off and instead the original vertex normals imported from the .obj file to be used instead.

In this Carrara discussion thread there is some similar stuff being discussed:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/48202/

The part of particular interest is:
"looks like theres also a on off switch “smooth” which turns of the auto smoothing and uses the the original obj data"

I think from the context of the previous message that is being replied to that this "smooth" switch mentioned there is on some kind of "Surfaces" pane - any luck finding that?


> I don't suppose anyone has a method of fixing the problem before importing teh obj to Carrara such
> as a script of a work around involving passing the file through another program?

It seems unlikely because the problem seems to be in the Carrara import mechanism - it seems to be discarding the smoothing information that is included in the .obj file and cooking up its own smoothing which is inferior. No matter what other program you use you will still need to run it through the importer which then has this problem.

But maybe you can undo the problem if you can find the "smooth" switch referenced in the above thread that enables the original normals to be used...

- Michael

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Hi Michael
In Daz Studio there is an slider option to modify smoothing and and another button to turn it off. I think that this is what is being discussed and I have tried using it. To my less than educated technical eye what appears to happen when smoothing is disabled is that the model has no smooth edges at all so each polygon can be seen as a flat plane with creases where the edges join adjacent polygons.

I cannot find anything similar in Carrara but that does not mean that it is not there.

>What you really want to have is the "break angle" normals creating mechanism totally turned off and instead the original vertex normals imported from the .obj file to be used instead.<

I will try and learn to understand what you are talking about in this sentence but at the moment lack the technical knowledge. I think if I understand correctly that while DAZ Studio can turn off "break angle" smoothing it does not then use the original vertex normal data. I assume then that both Carrara and Daz Studio will have problems importing an OBJ file created by many modeling programs not just Moi.

The reason that I became interested in the issue is that the shader domains that can be set in Moi are perfectly preserved in Daz studio which would in theory make creating content for Daz studio very quick and efficient in this respect. Its a shame that the smoothing issue seems to prevent this smooth throughput as Moi could be a very useful tool for the people who make models for Daz Studio.

Keith

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Hi Keith,

> I assume then that both Carrara and Daz Studio will have problems importing an OBJ file created by
> many modeling programs not just Moi.

Yes, that's correct - basically it will be problematic to import OBJ files created by any CAD program. CAD programs need to have the rendering program use the vertex normals information that is stored in the OBJ file. If the importing application just ignores those normals (which come from the original CAD surfaces), and instead creates new normals just by looking at the polygon data alone it will result in shading artifacts.

If all the polygons are very evenly distributed and of almost the same size that also tends to reduce these kinds of artifacts, and since most sub-d models are constructed in that way sub-d models are generally not as impacted by this problem. That is likely why they did not realize they were messing things up when they changed how they deal with vertex normals in the imported files, because they probably only tested it with sub-d models and not any CAD generated models.

If you can find the "Surfaces pane" in Carrara that may be where you can find the control to turn off break-angle normal generation and possibly restore the original normals as described in that Carrara discussion thread.

- Michael

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Hi Ed,

I just read this tutorial. Fantastic work! I'm happy that my scripts helped you :)
I hope, I'll return to script development in the nearest future. Unfortunatelly I haven't free time for it now.

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Thank you Max for bringing this added functionality to MoI. I'm sure your scripts will help a lot of people.

Ed Ferguson

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Help please,
I'm new to scripts and the forum. I downloaded scripts and copied and pasted into MoI's command file.
when I tryed subdivide, got- SyntaxError: Parse error
any help would be appreciated.

thanks,

Bob

Attachments:
FlySketchWorkflow-2015.06.15 00.22.20.pdf.pdf
FlySketchWorkflow-2015.06.15 00.32.47.tiff

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Hi Bob - it looks like you have copied the files into the correct place. But it looks like you may have some problem in how the shortcut key is set up, do you have some extra characters in the shortcut key or something like that?

In the shortcut key, you should put in just: Subdiv_beta6

- Michael

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That is is curious because all plugins by Max are something like _Subdiv_beta6 with a "_" as first letter!
Have you modified the name of the original script as shown on your list of files ?

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Michael

Thank you, I was trying to use the detected buttons, but the shortcut keys work!
This is really a great addition to your program. I have friends that rave about Creo for product design, this seems to give a MoI another level of flexibility in model generation.

Thanks

Bob

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Pllou

yes I did (my ignorance). Micheal's direction on the shortcut keys got it working.
I'm really excited to try out this new tools!

thanks for your help

bob

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Absolutely awesome tutorial - thanks so much for this!


-Will

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Thank you so much for producing this wonderful tutorial Ed!

Definitely one I'll be putting on the reference shelf - and referring people to as a great example of just how capable MoI (+ Max's SubD) is.

Keep up the great work.

Cheers,
Hamish

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Hey man...you did an OUTSTANDING JOB!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'll never be tired to say that....I love to see this project...in the right hands, this little gem of program can do really amazing things! :)

Great job, and thanks a ton for the tutorial!!!! :)

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