Hi Leonard,

> I would like to see a pre-Modo version to get an idea of how
> much sculpting he did in Modo.

Check out the next message down in that same thread, where there is a screenshot of the original model:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2704.18

I think he probably used some kind of bend transform on the whole object and not individual vertex level adjustments if that is what you mean by "sculpting" though.


> So, you are saying that Moi objects exported with small diced
> up polygons should be just fine for normal sculpting.

Well, yes - small diced up polygons should allow objects to be deformed with various things like "bend", "twist", etc...

What exactly do you mean by "sculpting" though, are you talking about some particular tool in Cinema4D?


> I did set the Divide larger than but probably not fine enough,
> fearing that too fine a setting would make the file very large.

Yes, it will probably make the file pretty large which is why it does not generate output like that as the default.

But unless you have like a 10 year old computer you should be able to handle a pretty large file ok.

- Michael

"Manual retopo? eeeek!

I will check into TopoGun; it has been mentioned a few times in some forums..."


True, I agree, it seems like twice the work but unless you're really good at straight poly modeling, I find creating concepts in MoI to be much faster than when working at the polygon level - that's just me.

Perhaps it balances out - time saved in initial model development, time spent in retopo to get an optimized mesh that can be SDS'd or that fit into a polygon budget for your game engine etc.


-Will

PS- Also take a gander at 3D-Coat as well if you've never tried it, it's pretty decent for what features it has.

Hi Michael,

> Check out the next message down in that same thread,
> where there is a screenshot of the original model:

OMG! + Duh. Wow, that makes PaQ's Modo model amazing. Ah, a bend transform. I thought perhaps he used "individual vertex level adjustments" = "sculpting".

> What exactly do you mean by "sculpting" though, are you
> talking about some particular tool in Cinema4D?

Yes. One way to make wrinkles in C4D is to make cuts with the knife tool, set a bevel to the edges and pull the edges. Also, I want to take portions, areas or sections of vertices and bend them. The idea is to make the "perfect" object look used such as the chaise longue headrest below.

As far as file size, my three year old does pretty well. :-)

Leonard

Hi Will,

I certainly agree with everything you said. I will check out 3D-Coat.

Thx.

Leonard

And if I you have no money (export from moi in skp format)
http://sketchup.google.com/intl/en/
Google Sketchup has some tools for some twisting and bending volumes :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPbb8PPGtVg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGHTIOMm_34

Hi Leonard,


It can be better to try and use displacement or bump mapping at render time to do that rather than modeling little bumps directly.


For many situations the output from MoI will not be very well suited for individual vertex level manipulation, but for your particular case where your headrest has a simple structure made up of one larger surface, that will probably generate some good output for vertex manipulations in that particular area of your model, because the mesh will have a nice regular topology in there.

If you want to do a lot of individual vertex adjustments right in an area where there are many edges and surfaces coming together in different ways (like at booleaned intersections), then those places are not as good for vertex editing and that's when you would probably need to think more about retopologizing, or possibly creating the model in polygons from the start with a vertex adjusting friendly topology from the beginning.

For your headrest though that should be fine I think with just a denser mesh generated by using "Divide larger than".

If you want to only generate a dense mesh on just the headrest, you can select it and use File > Export to write just the headrest to an OBJ file - Export will only write the selected objects to the mesh file.

- Michael

Hi Pilou,

You can imagine the wrinkles that are necessary to make the headrest above look used and how the ends would be angled in due to the weight and shape of head on the center section. I could be wrong but I think the knife or magnet approach would be used for wrinkles and deforming tools to "bend" the ends inward.

Leonard

Hi Michael.

> It can be better to try and use displacement or bump mapping at render time to do that rather
> than modeling little bumps directly.

Zbrush, 3D Coat, etc. for the wrinkles and deforming for tilting the ends inward.

> ...but for your particular case where your headrest has a simple structure made up of one
> larger surface, that will probably generate some good output for vertex manipulations in
> that particular area of your model, because the mesh will have a nice regular topology in there.

> For your headrest though that should be fine I think with just a denser mesh generated by using
> "Divide larger than".

I think you are right despite the strange results from my first attempt. I will export a number of
headrests with varying densities and do some local cuts.

Thanks,

Leonard

Hi Leonard, if you were getting some strange initial results, you may not have divided the polygons up to a fine enough degree.

Don't be so hesitant about it, especially if you are selecting just the headrest and using export, get it diced up into really a whole lot of little tiny pieces and that will deform better for you.


> Zbrush, 3D Coat, etc. for the wrinkles and deforming for
> tilting the ends inward.

Yeah those are good tools for doing that kind of a thing.

For ZBrush you should try to dice it up into pretty small pieces.

For 3D-Coat if you are using the Voxel painting mode, you actually do not need to dice it up so finely for that case because 3D-Coat's Voxel mode does not use the polygon vertices directly for deforming, it converts the polygons into voxels and then the voxels are deformed. So for that particular mode you don't need to have to have diced up polygons as much.

- Michael

Hi Michael. I have not gone through the multiple exports with varying settings. The original headrest export had Divide larger than = 2 and the polygon slider set at 8. I plan export with settings for Divide larger than settings at .25, .5, 1, and 1.5. Hopefully this afternoon.

I will post the results.

Leonard

Hi Michael,

I was playing with the headrest mesh and noticed triangles appearing in rendered areas. The only modification to the mesh has been made with the C4D magnet tool. Is this from Moi or is it a C4D issue? Is there a correction?

A C4D v10.5 file is attached. The Moi export settings were Angle 20, DLT .5 (Tessellation can be seen with Angle at 20.)

Leonard

Hi Leonard, that looks like a polygon modeling issue - if you're going to grab just a single vertex and pull it around you may want to export as all triangles rather than as n-gons. Or C4D also probably has a triangulation command that you could apply to it inside of C4D.

N-gons made up of many points do not behave very well if they get some points warped so that the n-gon is not anywhere close to planar anymore. It makes the triangulation of the n-gon to become ambiguous.

Check out this polygon modeling video tutorial for an illustration:
http://guerrillacg.org/home/3d-polygon-modeling/multi-sided-polygons


So that's probably the main thing you're running into.

You may also want to generate an even denser mesh than what you show there.

- Michael

I think you are spot on, Michael. I used the Magnet "needle" in that area. Staying with dome, ball or circle seems to work just fine.

The pic below shows what trangulate does for the mesh.

> You may also want to generate an even denser mesh than what you show there.

To avoid the tesselation up close, A=12 or 10. DLT=.25? Finer???

Thx.

L.

Hi Leonard,

> The pic below shows what trangulate does for the mesh.

You may want to export as Triangles directly out from MoI for a case like this. MoI's triangulator will put center points in for n-gons that can be triangulated in a radial manner, which can help to reduce some of the more skinny triangles.


> To avoid the tesselation up close, A=12 or 10. DLT=.25? Finer???

It's not so much for "up close" shots, but more that smaller polygons will reduce shading artifacts.

Remember - polygons are not actually smooth at all, they are only little flat pieces and the shading is done by a kind of trick.

If your polygons have too much variation between each adjacent one, that can tend to cause shading artifacts where the smooth shading trick does not work as well to make those flat pieces appear as if they were a smooth surface.

- Michael

Hi Michael, I exported triangles at Angle = 10, DLT = .25. The shading artifacts are there. I used the Magnet "circle" setting with the radius matched to the headrest but pulled a lesser distance. It appears to torque the edge polys too much.

> If your polygons have too much variation between each adjacent one, that can tend to cause
> shading artifacts where the smooth shading trick does not work as well to make those flat
> pieces appear as if they were a smooth surface.

Leonard

Hi Leonard, is there still a "normals" tag in C4D after you have done your editing, or has it automatically removed it?

If it did not remove it automatically, you may need to do it manually - that's again a polygon modeling issue - the vertex normals need to be recalculated when you jiggle vertices around.

You may need to post some of these polygon editing problems on a Cinema4D forum, I'm just not familiar enough with C4D's polygon modeling tools to give you a whole lot of specific C4D poly modeling advice.


You may be getting some kind of unwanted smoothing between the different adjacent pieces, maybe try manipulating the smoothing angle in C4D, or you may try exporting from MoI with welding disabled so that the vertices of adjacent pieces are separate. But try to group select them to manipulate them all at once if that is possible to avoid opening gaps between them.


Or you may be able to select a group of faces and set them as a smoothing group so that the smoothing does not leak between different sections of your model. Again, that's just another polygon modeling technique that does not really have much to do with MoI specifically.


You may have some easier time making those kinds of edits if you had separate objects there that just punched through each other rather than having an actual single solid object where the vertices were all connected to one another. Like for instance make the piping its own object rather than having it actually connected to the other pieces. That will help to keep its smooth shading separate from the others. Just let the pieces punch through each other instead of actually having them booleaned into a single piece. Sorry I did not give you this advice earlier, I did not quite realize that you were going to try to make those kind of edits right near those juncture areas.


- Michael

I am probably mising some connections --again!--but I can not understand why there is a problem?
(I generally,other times, save as n-gons to use in Carrara)

In this instance, after "softening" in Carrara I can do this easily.
Is that what is wanted?

Brian

Hi Brian, different polygon apps can work in slightly different ways.

If the polygon smooth shading ends up crossing over what should be a sharp corner, it can make some kinds of shading artifacts.

Some programs may automatically manage polygons to cluster them by angle to decide where to make shading breaks, and some programs may need for it to be specified manually.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

> ...is there still a "normals" tag in C4D...

That was it. Deleting the Base Tag [Normal] and the aberrations disappeared.

Moreover, I did not follow your suggestion posted somewhere, sometime ago, "It is not necessary to use Riptide to import into C4D." Riptide adds three tags exacerbating the problem. Strip those out plus the normal tag and the Riptide import is fine. But, you are right, Riptide is unnecessary.

This has been about working within the overlap of two modeling apps and how well Moi plays in C4D's environment. Tweaking remains but Moi's mesh is good to go.

Thanks for all the help, Michael.

Leonard

No problem Leonard, I'm glad that you are getting the results you wanted now!

Yeah with that normals tag still in place, it was basically trying to use the shading information from the original imported mesh which did not match your edited result any more.

Re: Riptide - if I remember right, there is some stuff that Riptide supports that the stock OBJ importer does not... I think it might have been reading in the material colors from the companion .mtl file.

So although Riptide does not seem to be necessary for bringing in the basic geometry, if you want to bring in all materials on a more complex model where you may have a few dozen styles set up in MoI, then it may be more useful.

- Michael