Chess Queen
 

I'm doing a texturing project for school and thought I post it. Almost done modeling but I'm not sure hot to model those squigly things on top of the piece. Should I model it seperately or would I be ok extruding? Crits on topology would be helpful too.

So far so good, the head will be th tough part.
What kind of texture are you doing for it?

A general advice: model it as it in in real life. It will look most realistic.

I got more done on this today. For some reason, mental ray isn't rendering the piece correctly. I already smoothed it, but it keeps looking like it's unsmoothed when rendered even when I change views. I could use some help with this.

@alexanderH- I'll probably go with a glass look or ivory.

wire

when you say smoothed do you mean you are hitting the "1" "2" or "3" keys? If so that is not smoothing it. Infact it gives you a real-time display of what it'll look like when converted to sub d's at a display level of 1 2 or 3. I've noticed if you apply a mesh smooth with a division level of 1 than you can replicate the look of the "3" key. or converted to sub D's at level 3 display.

To get it to render as you see it displayed convert to sub d's level 3 display or add a mesh smooth and you should be just fine.

If that is not the problem do let me know.

Well, the file is gone now because I didn't back it up but the problem was that I deleted the original mesh by mistake and kept the proxy. For some reason mental ray doesn't render the smoothed proxy but the low-poly version instead. So even if the poly-proxy is smoothed afterwards , mr won't render it that way.