My calculator

[Vash]

I was thinking of modeling a calculator for awhile, but then I started. It has an insane 1492 patches. Originally, before spline reduction, it had well over 2000 patches. I sort of did a small preparation before hand for this by modeling my masterlator. I don't know what it should do, I just made it as preparation. I'm the creator, how should I know what it does? Anyway here's a pic of that:

 

Note that the M is not a bump map. I actually took time to engrave that.

[Vash]

Here's the calculator so far:

gif.BMP

[Mr. Jaqe]

can we have a look from front view aswell? pretty pliiiiiz? with a cherry on top? Kinda hard to judge much, from the narrow angle you see the calculator from, but what I see, looks very good. May need some "edge tweaking", tho, but then again, hard to judge from such a narrow view.

[jamagica]

Why did you make the M part of the mesh? It'd take about 100 times less the time it takes to stitch it in

[Vash]

Jamagica, like I said it was merely a test. Plus I wanted to see how well I could engrave. But anyhow, from the front view:

[jamagica]

did you use the duplicator wiz- for that?

[Vash]

Actually I manually attatched everything. I am very adept at the duplicator wizard.

[jamagica]

Oh...you could have used the duplicator to make the copies then attached those

[Vash]

I merely have to apply decals and clear up a few things. Here are my near finished results. Critiques and Criticism is accepted. Please comment, I want to know your thoughts of this. It is 2008 patches.

[jamagica]

Usually the keys would be differently colored, and there'd be numbers on them...other than that, the structure and bevels are great

[Vash]

Bevel? What's a bevel? I had an idea and used it but I don't know for the love of me what a bevel is. I added some decals and colors for the button. Please tell me what I could do to make it better (besides that Jamagica).

[JoshB]

The rounded corners.

 

Look in your cd and pull out the beveled cube and compare that to a regular six sided patch.

 

J

[Rodney]

Vash,

Hash's own Yves Poissant once wrote (and demonstrated) extensively on bevels.

 

Look here for some of that info from his site:

http://www.ypoart.com/tutorials/bevels-intro.htm

 

Don't get distracted though... too much to see on his site.

 

**Nice calculator by-the-way!

[Vash]

I was pretty sure that's what beveling was but I wasn't sure.

[Eos]

Emmm.... Vash....

 

Where's the zero? What kind of calculator doesn't allow you to put the number 0?

 

Anyway it's looking good so far. I would recommend the beveling too. The blue color makes hard to see the details, but it can be solved in the final image with the specularity or reflections.

 

Could you post a wire? I still can't identify 2000 patches there.

[Eos]

Oh, just got it. It seems that you actually did a beveling in the calculator and the buttons. Maybe the blue color kinda hid it. Override the last comment about them.

[Vash]

Promise you won't kill me when you see the wireframe? I put a zero in place of SCI and changed SCI with C. I tried for optimal patch reduction but that wasn't that good. Yes indeed I did bevel. Everything but the screen.

[nf1nk]

Recently I did a key pad for a radio in the planes I was doing for a while, and I found that It didn't look much different when I made the backplate one flat patch and then just sort of set my squarish buttons on top, as opposed to setting each button in its own divot

(later I noticed there was almost no angle you could see the radio from, but that is another story). I guess my question is does it need all of them, because to me it would look about the same if the blue part had about 1/4 the patches

[Vash]

Yes it does need a lot of those patches. If I were to delete the patches between buttons it would create 8 point areas unrenderable. I have little holes in which I set the buttons, So I need quite a few of those patches. Here's a movie with my calculator failing horribly:

Calculator_Trouble.MOV

[nf1nk]

I did a test render of the radio I did for my blimp, obviously it could stand to be beveled, but you can't really see this thing so I am not even gong to decal the buttons, but the main thing you can see in this shot is that my buttons do not affect the number of patches I used for the back plate

[Vash]

Free Geometry... But the buttons on my calculator are rigged, so if I just used free standing geometry instead of these holes, Then when the buttons fall out in some action you won't even know where the buttons were! You're radio obviously doesn't have a rig, and the buttons are never going to move. That's where the differences start.