Jr.Who - W.I.P. - Spitfire Plane
 

Hey guys,

Time for another W.I.P.! I've been working on this one for a couple of days (on and off). I was going to post this up yesterday, but it was my birthday. Anyway, after I texture this, I'm going to take a stab at compositing, and possibly some animation with compositing.

Like usual, I’m just going to put up screen grabs, but when I get to texturing, I’ll be doing some good renders.

-Jr.Who
:beer:

Here's after 3 days of work.

And 5 days. I think I've spent about 3 hours on this. I'm hoping that I get some more work finished later today.

very nice, i like where this is heading :)

Thanks, AikoWorld.

I'm getting a little worried about the mesh, though. It doesn't seem to want to cooperate as much as I thought it would.

Anyway, the poly count is 2,782 faces in this pic.

nice job jr who :beer:

what problems are you having with the mesh?

Thanks, Arran. :beer:

Mostly around the front where the pipe things are. I'm trying to square off the box that they are in, but it makes hard edges on the rest of the plane, too.

have you used soft/harden edge function in the normals tab?

Or is it not i poly, i cant really tell from the images.

If it is nurbs then im of no use to you :)

hmm - if your're using polys than I would wait until you have the model finished and then use the soften harden tool to go back over your model to decide where you want soft or hard edges.

if it's nurbs, than i'm not sure...

arran a question for you what reason is it to wait till the model is finished before soften harden tool?

cuz i use it allot and i think i have used it while modelling.

thx

For a real quality polymodel all edges should be soft. The "hard" edges should appear because of beveling. Hard/soft edges are mostly for low polygon modeling.

yeah - i do too - i just find that further modeling tends to cancel things i've done with the normals tool, so I usually do a soften at the end and then go back over any problem edges... though i think djblazer makes sense - any high poly models should essentially be soft. I find the soften / harden tool helpful when i'm doing hard modelling.

thx for you guys`s insight about soften harden :) thx!

Thanks for the tips, guys. I'll try them next time I get into Maya.

BTW, it isn't NURBS, it's just polygons with the 3 key pressed in '08. I love this, because haven't used sub'ds in so long. :D

Looking good JR. Yeah getting tight corners in a curved section of a polymodel can be a real pain.

I don't really have any method that I can suggest. The only thing I have done that can sometimes work is to try and cut the section out to localize the edge flow. In some cases that works well and adds some realistic sections with panel lines. But Iam not sure it would work well for this section of the SF.

ow if you dont mind adding extra polygons i would add another edge loop. To create an edge, thats what i do.

hey JrWho

Try inserting 2 edgeloops round the corner edges (like if you performed a bevel but doing it manually helps to stop some of the little bugs that in my useage of bevels can happen), you can then use the slide edge tool to move the edges and control the fall off of the edge.

I would also create a smooth proxy as well as switching between the smooth preview, as sometimes when you using the smooth preview it can be a bit misleading as to where the geo that your moving actually is. Where as using the standard low poly and a proxy you can see if you need to add geo to areas when the edges get too close/overlap which is hard to see in the smooth preview. Also keep the low poly nice and clean.

What?

Do you mean insert some edges around the area, and not have them run through the rest of the mesh? Like these blue lines in this pic?

gster refined what i was talking about :)

Creating extra edges like your image will create a hard edge. dont forget to weld the corner vertices to create quads instead of 6 sided poly`s

I knew that the closer the edges, the crisper the smooth will be, but I always thought it was better to have the mesh flow throughout the model. Maybe I'm just imagining things. ;)

well if you make edges go all the way you create alot of polygons.

I sometimes just change 90 degrees to avoid going all the way to the other side :)

But for hard surfaces it dose not matter.

If you go soft surfaces (organic)then you have to consider this very carefully as you will need to animate all the edges you have created. :)

yeah - aikoworld is right - having an even mesh isn't that important (as far as i know) when it comes to hard surface. if your object doesn't have to deform than as long as it looks good it should be fine.

Yeah having an even mesh isnt that important, I like to try to keep it clean and even as I find it easier to lay out when UV mapping, and I always have the niggeling feeling that a concentration/lack of geo might make a bit of a strange highlight at rendertime, dunno why just do!

Jr Who, on the pic you posted if you take the corner of the new square made by the new loop and then add an edge from that to the corner of the other you'll carry on the quad structure which is what I would do

Gah, I've tried a bunch of different ways, but I can't get it right. The part I'm trying to fix is what's in the pic.

Anyway, I did some work today, but nothing worthy of a pic.

JR. I feel your pain. As an exercise I spent a little time last night trying to put a square hole into a curved surface and could not do it without pinching in the corners or creasing down the enitre model.

I just created a couple of curves and lofted them. Converted to polygon and then tried to put a rectangular opening in the surface while maintaining a smooth surface.

What a nightmare! If you try to put all the proper edge loops in the corners (3) they carry through the entire length of the surface giving you nice sharp visible creases. If you try to spread them out you still get pinching in the corners and lots of extra ugly geometry throughout your model that all has to be adjusted (very time consumming and the results are still bad).

I tried smoothing the surface and setting the divisions really high then using the sculpt tool to smooth out the edges and pinched corners and then set the divisions back to 0. All I can say to this excercise is that I still have not found a use for the sculpt tool (lol). It just made a real mess of the model.

I tried cutting up the geometry and making panels this worked the best but creates 4 panels around the square opening which is kind of a pain. Although if you plan them correctly it kind of looks natural.

I'll keep fiddling with it in my spare time and if I hit on anything I'll post it for you.

Keep plugin at it. I look forward to the final product. I wont be able to do any serious modeling until winter break. I need to finish rigging and animating my mech. I think I have to leg piston thingy worked out. Just don't have time to focus onit right now.

Here is what I mean by spliting up the geometry in a way that a hard surface object might actually be manufactured in panels. It solves the problem of carrying unwnated geometry through your entire model and creates realistic panel lines.

1/4

2/4

3/4

4/4 - add some rivets or better yet cowl fasteners and it would look very natural...

Hope this helps.

-Rick M

Rick, thanks a lot. Now that you mention it, one of my refs looks kinda like that. Hopefully it'll work out.

Good luck on that mech.
:beer:

Well, it still doesn't want to cooperate very well, and it's getting pretty irritating. I think I'll just leave it and hope that the texture hides it. :D

When I'm done with the tuts I'm going to try to add some more detail. Here's one of the refs that I am using for it (aside from Kurt's):

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi..._Mk_XVI_NR.jpg

I got some more work done on it today, the poly count is at 4,382 faces now.

looks good so far

only a few crits. where the wing joins the fusalage at the front need to be rounded i think

also at the exhaust at the back u might have a problem with tangency

tail looks a bit dense from this angle

only small things that are easily to fix now to make this into a great model

OK, I'll try to fix that.

I don't know that much about planes, can you please explain? A pic would be cool, too.

Yeah, I'll try to fix that too.

JR here is another option for the square hole in a rounded surface problem. Wait until after you smooth the surface. Then cut the hole and bevel the edges.

No odd pinching in the corners with this mothod. But I think you'd have to delete history and uv layout the more dense smoothed model.

note 2.

Also your leading edge at the root is quite squared off and should be rounded.

Once again I think this problem can be fixed if you look at the way this filleted area of the wing is constructed in the actual airplane. Its really a seperate piece, so you might want to consider using a nurbs surface fillet to recreate it.

Make the fusalage, the wing and the wing fillet seperate parts. This way you could keep the wing and fusalage geometry lighter and take advantage of the nurbs surfacing fillet tool to create that shape.

It's a bad habit working on smoothed meshes though and not having the option to go back to lores. Last resort really... I think I only needed to do it once so far.

Rick, I appreciate the help, but I've spent way too much time trying to fix it, and it all results in wasted time.

So, I did 2 parts of the tut today (to make up for yesterday), and I might do another one tonight (to make up for tomorrow, because I might be too busy to work).

Here's the wireframe pic:

And the regular pic:

Sorry about the lack of updates, I've been pretty busy lately. I'll be posting my finished model tomorrow, when I update my website.
:beer:

OK, here's the finished model. Hopefully I'll be able to start the UV mapping (:() tomorrow, although I might be too busy.

The usual:

If you look on my site, you’ll find the HD pic (which I would highly recommend doing).

Does anyone have anything to say about the model, before I start the texturing?

-Jr.Who
:beer:

The only glaring issue I see is the leading edge of the wing where it meets the fuselage. It should be rounded.