...Every edges are filleted

Yes, in the real world every sharp edge needs at least a small fillet (unless you're making knife blades).

An automatic solution would be nice. I've experienced the slow-down and large file size increase after adding fillets, even in my moderate size models.

Auto-fit fillet would also be nice. That is, if two surfaces meet in a sharp inside corner and a large fillet is specified, the fillet could auto-taper as needed to meet in the corner.

Ed

the Edge Softening plugin is awesome. I've been using it a lot for rendering chains in Brazil for Rhino.

jonah

Really nice jonah,

So I not alone in the 'fillet everything' trip :)

I was a bit complaining last time about MoI uv's ... in fact as Michael suggest it, a simple packing and the .obj is ready to be textured :)

Nope, certainly not alone :) but it's so easy to get out of control using real fillets. I've requested texture packing a long time ago too. I think more people will support it when MoI develops a link to an external render engine...

jonah

Hi Pascal,

Even though I come from the engineering field I liked your first rendition of the foot with the wide teeth gearing, even though they are not technically correct it gives it more of a retro industrial feel to it, when modeling for visual effect I think technical correctness shouldn't get in the way of artistic expression.
Just my thoughts.

Cheers

I love the look of everything. This is total pro work. Great job PaQ!
Wish i could learn how to do that but i don't have the program yet. :)
The textures....wow. What did you use for that?

Hi Danny, yes you're right for the retro look. In fact I could make bigger technically working teeth, be I'm also trying to give a 'huge' aspectof the elephant. I'm not sure if smaller teeth will help, I have tons of reference in fact, for this gear I'm using this image :

Hi jiro, and welcome :)

For the textures, well I have a huge photo's collection I've made myself sine 10 years, and ............. no that's wrong :P
Just go there -> http://www.cgtextures.com/

For the gear I'm just using this one,



The same image is used for the diffuse color, the diffuse amount (but with a different projection scaling), and for the bump.

Then I do a little compositing in photoshop.



Image 1: color diffuse Image 2: Specular boosted Image 3: Ambient occlusion

So I mix the 2 first image with a mask, to have variation and more specular in frictions area. I can use a vertex map to mix them directly in the surface editor, but as I'm doing a still image I don't care and I paint the mask in photoshop, it's faster :)

The last image, the ambient occlusion pass, is used as an overlay layer to boost the contrast. (it's a cheap dirt layer)

Hi Pascal,
Yeah, I like how they made machinery back in the 1800's to 1900's not only were they fuctional, you can tell they had a bit more pride in their work in those days because they added a bit more styling even though the machines were hidden away.
I also like the way big clock gears look, like townhall clocks.




Oh yeah, thanks for that textures link.

Cheers
~Danny~

Nice one !!! copied in my ref folder :)

What I really love in this kind of model is how simple the shapes are, just some tubes or other basic primitives combo ... easy to build in MoI !

Yes Danny, it looks very nice. On the other hand, the gears in clock, it isn't about the power or torque. It is just matter of silent and patient cogwheels motion :) -Petr

Really nice model - love the style :-)

Here's an other render test, with a generic shader .... again to validate the workflow and see how textures can hide some modeling details. I have a better idea where to put details and where it's not needed.

So now I just have to finish the modeling .. See you in one month :P

The textures are looking fantastic in the test, can't wait to see the whole thing done! :)

re: display speed - if you'd like to send me the model that is bogging down, I could try using it to do some profiling over here to try and narrow down what is causing the most slowdown. But I've actually done quite a lot of work on that already in v1. However maybe I'll see that there are some particular kinds of surfaces that are getting too heavily meshed and that might give me an idea on how to compensate for that.

One thing you might also try in addition to the meshing settings is to turn the hidden-line display off - the hidden lines display does a second pass through curves, so turning it off will reduce the amount of curve drawing by half.

- Michael

Hi Petr,

You wrote:
> On the other hand, the gears in clock, it isn't about the power or torque.
> It is just matter of silent and patient cogwheels motion

Yes I agree, practically, you wouldn't use such gears in a power torque situation, I was referring to to the visual aspect of Pascal's project.
If we were going to build this thing literally (which would be so cool) :) yeah, you would have to engineer it properly.

Cheers

Hi Michael,

I've mail you the object.

The 'problem' in fact it's not exactly the display speed, I'm quite happy with it, but I get problem to do transformation, like moving or rotation of the whole object ... it's nearly impossible :S. No way to place the mirror line too.

Btw a little smoke test :)

Hi PaQ, cool smoke test!

re: Transformation speed instead of display speed - that is an area that I can more easily improve.

Currently it creates a complete copied object for every transformation result, and especially mirror does a bunch of work that tends to make it slow on larger objects.

It should be possible for me to improve this quite a bit to kind of redraw the existing object during the dynamic part of transformations instead of making actual duplicates until you are finished.

- Michael

Hi Michael.

That sounds really great.

I dont' know if it's the same 'redrawing' problem that also slow down the extrude function. It's probably less critical, but I also fell some huge slow down when extruding complex shape, like for example an 60 teethes gear created with the spur gear script.

Whatever, can't wait to see the improvement !

Have a good Siggraph :)

Hi PaQ - the basic problem is that a very complex object that takes up a really big chunk of memory (like your objects in the file you sent me take up about 0.5 GB) can take some time to process.

For extrude, it is just taking that long to create the object and also the object's mesh.

Improving extrude will be a lot more difficult, because there is not an already existing equivalent object that can just be drawn in a new location like it is possible to do with transforms.

In the future to improve things like extrude it will pretty much require doing a kind of wireframe mode instead of shaded mode, a wireframe mode will avoid the mesh calculation step which will be the most time consuming part for something like extrude. But I also want to make the mesh calculation multi-core capable which should help out as well.

- Michael

Sure a wireframe view will help a lot ... Can't wait for the multi-core meshing too :)