Harp
 

I'm building a harp and I'm finding that nurbs work best for a lot of the components, but I'm not as familiar with modelling with nurbs, and I was wondering if anyone could help me with a couple things. I'm trying to cap a lofted surface, but not sure the best tool to do it. I tried open/close surface, but to no avail. Here's what I've got so far. You can see the base is open right now, but I want to close it up without seams, so I can possibly convert to poly in the future. Thanks!

try selecting the isoparm and doing a planar. that should work for you.

Cool, thanks... now how should I attach the resulting surfaces together? I suppose after I convert to poly, I could attach them together, but I'd like to learn more about surfaces while the opportunity is here. I tried attach surfaces, but it said "cannot attach trimmed surface".

Ok, I decided to convert to poly and do things the way I already know, cause this is for an assignment due Monday, so I needed to keep going.

That's what school's for right? Just get it done and worry about the learning later ;) :p
I'll go through a NURBS hard surface modelling tutorial next week when I have time :)

Anyways, most of the components are there, just have to duplicate the strings, levers and feet. Oh yeah, and there's a really tricky piece at the top that I need to do at the end.

Alright, so I've been working on getting all the 36 levers and strings and posts in the right spot, which isn't super straightforward, cause they vary in distance from each other depending on where they are on the board. Anyway, still have to fix up the top attachment bit and cut some holes in the back...

...and a detail shot... though it's mostly primitives here. Low level of detail on the details :p

very nice going to be textured???
and what school you at

Thanks... yeah texturing will be next. I'm at the University of Victoria, but I'm basically just doing a directed study learning a bit of maya. Just finished the model pretty much. Couple of details I didn't add, mainly cause it would have been hard to add them without booleans, and I don't like booleans.

yeah - don't use booleans - waste of time.. ;)

really nice so far stwert and great choice of model - this should be fun to texture. what you going to go for? it might be nice to make it look kind of worn and old.

Thanks arran... this is actually my wife's harp and it's only a few years old, so still looking pretty glossy. It's made of really nice red rich-looking wood, so hopefully I can capture that. I'll be working on the UVs today (not very experienced with that yet) and should be textured by monday (or I get an F ;) ).

So I more or less finished the UV mapping... :headbang: great fun. What do you guys recommend in the way of a really good (i.e. thorough) tutorial for UV mapping and texturing? I know that's been asked a lot, but they seem to be in less quantity and quality than, say, modelling tutorials. I was going to post a screenshot last night, but I think the site was down? I got a red hat apache notice page...

I'll try to post some screenshots and some updated real texturing tonight.

I decided to go back and do a bit better job of laying out the UVs today, and having a problem here. I was following a method of selecting certain areas of faces and applying separate UV projections. Fine, that worked quite well, but the texture that I applied is not showing up... you can see a checked texture on the object, but it's not related to the UVs in my UV editor (and there's no texture showing up in the UV editor).

Thanks for any help!

So I did some procedural textures and tried out some lighting and stuff. Still would like any info on the above problem, but please comment/critique on the render too.
I know, I overdid it on the wood reflectivity, but still just playing around.

...and I'll get around to putting images on a dedicated image site so I won't have to scale them way down.

in UVTE - image> display image

Thanks for the suggestion hammer. I did try that, and the thing is is that the UVs somehow aren't corresponding to the perspective view. E.g. I grab some UVs from the editor and pull them sideways, so the persp textures should get skewed, right? But they don't. I know that because the caps shouldn't be distorted based on my UV layout, but they're really skewed in the persp view too.