It's really coming together nicely!

- Michael

@Michael
Thanks mate :)

@Max3d
hehe good idea, dont forget the slow motion :D

Having a physical object doesn't help if you dont make pictures/scans of it, at least
for complicated things. But its always better to have both real and references images.

Here's my ultra secret workflow:
Step 1 - I create the overall shape
Step 2 - I only use the basic tools and start detailling
Step 3 - Then I usually take a coffee
Step 4 - And I get back to step 2

It seems boring but if you stick with basic tools you will become very good, always choose the "easy" way.
Even if its slower or seem slower than using an other tool.
If you always decompose a shape into primitives into your head, and if you also do the
same into a 3d software, you will never face an impossible shape.
Dont forget construction lines, put more than needed is better than not enough.

Anybody can take a pencil and draw for month on a wall and make something awesome.
Even if the wall is only filled with millions of little circles and squares. I can draw a circle or a square on a wall for sure, everyone can!
But not everyone can do it for months, that's why it become a piece of art.

Making good models is all about the time you put into it, and MoI is perfect because in a smaller
amount of time you can trow a lot more details.

indeed, but when i model something in front of me i take images for refs and also make sketches and 2d drawings with the dimensions using my two vernier calipers sat on my desk just to make sure ( plus i have 2 metal rulers and a few plastic ones plus a couple of tape measures also sat on my desk at all times just incase yes i am an anal git)
i will wait and see about slow mo although i thought about it but the client inst interested in it as of yet. anyhoo keep them coming mate :)

@max3d
Well you have everything to rocks :D
Its good to see people using old'n'good drawing tools.

edit: Very nice portfolio mate :)
edit 2: wait you are Dave Davidson? Awesome, ive seen some of your stuff before :D
Maybe on some c4d forum, or even in the c4d help file am I right? In cgtalk also?
Cinema 4d is awesome with MoI !

What no slow motion? I wish I was your client hehe !
"can you please make a little more explosion there and there also? Yes put more particles plz"
"wait wait... not that way. Make that camera do a 360° around this piece"
"now that's badass! Good job man!"

hey if it was left to me i would still have my old drawing board, but sadly i had to chuck it as i have no room in the office for it.
Well i am a Dave Davidson thanks for liking the work on my site mate ( some of my scenes are in c4d and my name is in the help as a beta tester) and they sometimes use my work when advertising and i am all over forums like a rash pimping my work so yes to all :)) and NO SLOW MOTION.

Isnt there something you are supposed to be modeling ??? eh eh eh

Day 4 is done, new screenshots added.
I was in Hospital (im ok) all the morning so I just took time to rename solids and do a little more details.
Ive also saved and exploded MoI model for the fun :)

The Model cleaned is currently 54Mo so im not gonna upload it as attachments.
It takes 5 seconds on a 2.4ghz Quad to mesh in .obj with ngons at 12° angle.

Day 5 gonna by rendering and sharing the model, maybe this Monday if I got enough time.

@max3d
Yeah know I know why ive already seen your name hehe... very cool that Maxon use your work :)
Im gonna render it inside cinema 4d, when done I can send you the scene if you want (with the lighthing, objects named and grouped etc...)
So maybe you can tell if ive made any mistakes in term of rendering. Or if you want to render it ill be very proud :D
If I got enough time im gonna make an animation (a basic turntable but with the parts appearing one by one) or starting as exploded, then
slowly moving each parts into place.

yeah send the file mate and i look forward to seeing it when all done :)

@max3d
Heh I first need to setup all the materials :(
Also im exporting piece by piece in lwo because even when tweaking with "divide larger than" or "less than"
I cant find a good setting for everything without pushing the 170'000 ngons aha...

Maybe I should output quad + tri because C4D smooth tag does not fix everything. And If I render Cellulo it shows triangles.
edit: added a small AO render :) Im still trying different mesh density between objects.
edit 2: tried 3° angle for everything... 952'797 ngons yeah baby :D I bet I crash my workstation at 1°

Hi DesuDeus, it's looking great!

> Maybe I should output quad + tri because C4D smooth
> tag does not fix everything.

Did you mention above that you were using .lwo format?

I don't think that Cinema4D will read vertex normals from .lwo format, since they are kind of a much newer (and not well documented) optional chunk inside of that format. LWO format tends to be best to go into Modo or LightWave.

For Cinema4D I'd recommend trying OBJ format, which should probably solve your smoothing glitches because C4D will read the vertex normals from OBJ files and use them for shading, which tends to give much cleaner and smoother shading since those normals come from the original NURBS model and are not just produced by averaging polygon normals together.

There's also an alternate Cinema4D OBJ importer plugin called Riptide which is available for free from here: http://skinprops.com/riptide.php , which will also import colors from OBJ files which the standard importer does not do.

- Michael

Added Ambient Occlusion renders (non-optimized mesh, exported as .lwo at 3° angle in ngons)

@Michael
Thanks :D I still have a lot of work to do with animation and materials.
(hopefully we have build a homemade racked renderfarm with 8 quads at work in 2008)
Edit: no time.. animation will wait :(

Ive already worked with cinema 4d using .lwo but never noticed this particular problem before this model.
Im gonna try with Riptide, already heard of it. Never tried it before.
Also I think that cinema 4d triangulate the ngons when its from .lwo file.

Thanks for all the tips and tricks :)

Edit: Added the Edirol field recorder to the MoI gallery.
Uploaded the original 3dm file on rapidshare (I cant upload it as attachment it make an error)
Im not gonna render it with good materials, I have some real work to do now dont have enough time to spend on this model :(

@Michael
I would love to see your mettalic light system on this model :D

Here's a huge render for the fun :D

Hi DesuDeus, that's very cool, thanks for posting it for others to be able to check out!

It has really turned out great!


> What size do you need for MoI gallery?

Pretty much anything is fine - maybe something not too huge though like 1280x1024 or 1600x1200?

You can also upload more than one image, hit the "Add more" button to put in additional links, you can have stuff like modeling screenshots, alternate angles, etc...


> I would love to see your mettalic light system on this model :D


It doesn't really seem very metallic when zoomed out on the whole thing, but when you zoom in to some features it seems pretty good:







Of course one big thing is just having the style colors display on surfaces.

- Michael

Here's one with regular non-metallic, after running ExplodeMove on it to kind of jiggle it apart:



The main reason why I've been working on the lighting recently is that the old style lighting got really very dark with colorized surfaces that were not bright colors.

It seems to be working well in this case to keep things lit well.

- Michael

Hi Michael...

Good progress on the color mode :)
Can I add more light so the 3D model will look more brighter ?

For me, looks like your image "edirol_nonmetallic.png" need more brighter.

Thanks !

@Michael

"Hi DesuDeus, that's very cool, thanks for posting it for others to be able to check out!"

Thank you, that was the original motivation behind using MoI for it :)
Feel free to use this model when you need it, to test for example your light system on something complex (to check speed).
Ive posted it on the MoI gallery, I didn't know it was a "post yourself gallery" that's why I asked you about the image size.


I like that metallic look! There's not so many curvy surface on this model but the Handles looks great, the Screws also.
The colored solids are very cool too, but I hope you can de-activate the coloration of the solids in this case it looks like an "Edirol Christmas Tree".

"Here's one with regular non-metallic"

This one is cool with color solids, I should care to color with less saturation next time.

"The main reason why I've been working on the lighting recently is that the old style lighting got really very dark with colorized surfaces that were not bright colors."

Even in non-colorized surfaces it gets very dark, good work on the lighthing that's much better :)

COOL DesuDeus, I can see your model popping up in every rendering forum:)

@Neo
Thanks, well its just ambient occlusion. It always does the trick.
Ive only posted it on MoI forum and Nurbs + Poly wich is a cool forum too :D

Hi Anis,

> Can I add more light so the 3D model will look more brighter ?

I think there may be an option to put specular highlights which would brighten it further.

But the main reason this one looks dark-ish is the base surface colors are dark, the best way to brighten it would be to have some brighter base colors rather than dark base colors.

There is already quite a lot of light being applied to it, I don't think that you will typically want to put much more than that in, otherwise things that are brighter colors will become very washed out.

But probably specular highlights would be what would help in this kind of case.

- Michael

Works like a charm even on a very old computer! No slow down, no crash!

Hi DesuDeus, yes actually I meant to ask you about why you were worried about crashing older machines with this.

Did you actually run into a crash when running on some particular machine?

Over here when I load your file, it takes up about 158MB when first loaded where everything is hidden, then goes up to about 240MB when showing everything. So that's not really bad for old machines, unless it was a really very underpowered (very low RAM) old machine.

So I'm not really sure you would need to worry about that so much.

Also generally working with the full displayed model works fine on my 6 year old machine with a Radeon 9600 Pro video card...

- Michael