Creating raised rivits on ship hull

[Eric2575]

I have modeled every rivit on this upper structure with a small sphere. As the number of spheres increased, my copy/paste function slowed considerably.

 

To get back some speed, I cut each sphere in half, which helped quite a bit by cuttin down on spline count. I received a suggestion that I might be able to achieve rivits with displacement maps?

 

Take a look at my project and tell me if and how I could do this? It is important to be able to actually see raised rivits on the upper structure since close-up will be taken of it when finished.

 

Thanks

[starving4rtist]

How many patches are on each sphere? Whenever I have to do something like that, I use the 8-patch sphere on the cd. Looks great so far!

[Eric2575]

The spheres are cut in half and each half has 9 patches. I used a higher resolution sphere because the 8 patch sphere you mentioned tended to deform slightly. Not a whole bunch, but I didn't like the rendered result.

[Ganthofer]

At least in my experience (not extensive by any means) displacement maps are great, but require a dense enough mesh to give high detail results. It does prevent you from having to model the detail. I believe it only works for detail perpedicular to the surface of the patches ( no under cutting or over hangs).

 

For what you are doing, take a look at this thread, http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=6476&hl=rivet R Reynolds has a 4 patch rivet using 100% normal averaging that looks quite good and would decrease your patch count on rivet by more than half. he also supplied a zip of the rivet model.

[filipmun]

I was wondering if Hash could have a new tool like 'instance' where only the master is editable and the rest is represented in proxy and can be drag into position freely, while only visible when rendering.

 

Due to hi-res geometry, I switch to poly modeler. Better still if AM can have an additional poly functions.

[pleavens]

I was wondering if Hash could have a new tool like 'instance' where only the master is editable and the rest is represented in proxy and can be drag into position freely,

We already have that with action objects.

[filipmun]

I am missing somthing here, can you please elaborate?

 

I don't mean action but in model, a way to create high geometrical definition or to asemble in chor.

 

Thanks, I must try to build something in choreography, it never accur to me before.

[R Reynolds]

In my opinion, you can get away with 4 patches and some major bias tweaking for each rivet. You can get a copy of one here:

 

Rivet tutorial

 

Since Hash patched spheres are optimized to be smooth with 8 X-sections, a 4 patch rivet is a bit bumpy but considering how they were installed, so were real rivets.

 

BTW,

 

Nice Nautilus.

[ypoissant]

Action objects (One model, many instances):

 

- Crate the rivet in a separate model.

- Create an action using the submarine.

- Drop as many rivets as you need in the action and position them.

- In Choreography: Drop the submarine first

- And then drop the action onto the submarine next.

 

Another way which gives you more control later when animating is to add tiny bones at each rivet location and in the action, translate-to and orient-to each rivet instance to one of the rivet bones.

 

One advantge of this method is you can use a bump map for when the submarine is viewed from a far distance and use the action when you view a close-up view.

[KenH]

I'm not sure on this, but I think you can then save the model out of the chor and now it will be a seperate model with all it's rivets.

[filipmun]

Thank you ypoissant,

 

I ought to be ashame of myself for not knowing this at all, well AM is full of features and surprises.