Eric2575

I'll be watching Good splining. Eric

If you can find it, could you post the bump decal you used for the carpet? I'm always interested in bump maps.

I enjoyed that, good job!

Apart from the excellent modeling - he's kinda scary!! Wouldn't want to be a pedestrian in his way

That's much better, but you can still take out two of the front bunch of three splines in the door. If they are part of the window post, make the window post a separate entity in the model. In a real bug, they are a separate entity also. Don't be afraid to have many separate entities in a model. If the real thing is made up of several parts, model them that way. In the beginning I thought I had to make everything out of one single mesh. That's not the correct way to model. Doing really great. Eric

Looking at your spline layout, you can really reduce the number of splines in the hood and door panel without reducing detail. Make a copy of one door and play around with removing splines to see what you get. If you mess up, just delete it. If you like the new version better, delete the old version. I do that a lot when I model, always make a copy of something you intend on playing around with.

The hood problem looks like too much reflectivity in the color material. You also still have some peaked splines and or discontinuous splines - see the crease in the roof and door panel.

Lay out your model without bias tweaking first. Best to even turn off the bias handles. The tweaking comes later. If you bias tweak as you model, you're really opening a can of worms and you may also find that much of the bias tweaking was unnecessary. I started modeling with bias tweaking as I went and ended up setting many of the bias points back to zero once the modeling was done. Eric One more thing, I know it's tempting, but stay away from modeling or decaling your model until it's all done. This will keep you focused and less likely to rush the job.

Nice to see something from you again Rodger. That's eye candy to me

That looks like a really nice start.

Marcos: my sincerest apologies. I don't know what I was thinking - quite a bit of stress lately - I know your name is Marcos off course Eric

With those tight pants, are you sure he's interested in Cindy?

Found it: http://xtaz.com.br/index.php?option=com_co...3&Itemid=68 Check it out, it will help you. Eric

I just took a closer look at your splines in the pic. If you think and model with the flow of the metal, everything will get easier. Right now you are thinking flat, in a 2D way. Your splines are going straight up and down, straight right to left. You need to visualize in your head what the piece you are working on really looks like. It certainly isn't flat, it curves and flows in different directions. Try and arrange your splines to follow the flow of the curves. Every once in a while, turn your model slightly and look at it from a bird's eye view. If it is totally flat, you need to change it. The metal curves into the window openings. The door panels also curve from top to bottom and from right to left. the top of the roof might look like it is on the same plane looking sideways, but you are really laying down the center of the roof section. I don't know if you can still find them, but Xtaz, aka Carlos once started some tutorials on car modeling. He is a very good mechanical modeler and his tutorials are very good. Try and search for them on the forum. He still stops in once in a while, so maybe he can give you a link to them. Keep it up. You are doing great.

Just leave as is, the real ones aren't welded together either Try and post the model as a zip file again. I still want to check it out in AM.

I am going to call you DaVinchi from now on. I love the things you come up with.

Since a car is made up of many panels, it is often easier to model the panels detached from each other instead of trying to force the mesh in all sorts of different directions. A good example would be the bug's fenders. You have a lot of three point patches (bad) going on around the fenders and in the areas that connect them. If you separate the fenders from the main body, you can eliminate many of those problem areas. I don't mean create a separate model for each, but simply model them apart from the body mesh. Just like having a sphere and a box in the same modeling window. They are not separate models, but they are separate from each other in the modeling window. I do the same thing for the windows of the car. Right now you are trying to fit the mesh to the car frame and the window. If you separate the windows from the body, the window mesh will be easier to construct and will have fewer splines. You are doing a great job and these tips are only meant to give you some extra tools for your modeling journey.

You've still got some transparency going on there as is evident around the front headlight - you can see the rotoscope through the model. Why don't you make a zip file of the project and post it here and I or someone else will look at it and find the bugger that's causing your cammo sheer look. Also, don't make every part of the bug a different model, make them different goups if you want to assign different surface properties such as transparencies or different colors, or chrome, etc. The only time I recommend making several models out of a large model is when you are having computational difficulties due to a large patch count. If you would like some suggestions on how to make your model smoother, post shaded/wireframe renders and we can help you better.

Looks to me like the head;ight material is connected to the rest of the body. When you applied the transparency to the headlight, it covered the whole body and is causing the effect you see. You need to separate and name the headlight group from the rest of the body. Also, did you set the transparency in the object settings or in the model's group setting. You should have different groups and set everything there. The object group settings will affect the whole model no matter what. So, delete the transparency, group the headlight lens and set it's transparency there.

Chris: Could you post your hair settings please? How many control points are you using? Eric

Beautiful!

Al, you got it all wrong - The first pic is brighter because the Jupiter is in Earth's orbit, lit by sunlight. The second pic was obviously take way out in deep space. Get a clue and just look out the viewport. Geez, I hate to point out the obvious, but...

When I started modeling in AM and found bias tweaking, I thought I had found the holy grail, but...Now that I am a bit more experienced, I find that I will use bias tweaks very rarely. Once you learn how splines behave and how they flow, you will learn how to get smooth models. I just downloaded your model to take a peek, but won't be able to respond till later on tonight - gotta run. By that time, I'm sure someone else will have helped

Either Sir Nigel is a replicant, or he's in serious trouble

Al: Go to the tools/options/units menu and there you can set the grid to feet/inches or cm. Set it to feet, turn on your grid in the modeling window and see how long your model is. I'll bet you it's about four feet long