Detail Work - Crazy Times

I'm still plugging away at Lewis's Chevy tutorial, that and refreshing my C++ skills (another tale for another day). At this stage of the car, I'm working on details. Detail work is actually quite fun, but the effort and time spent on a particular piece of detail once placed in the scope of the full model can seem a bit crazy. I'll give you an example.

Lewis had just gone through one of the many detail sections, this one to create a rear light fixture. The good news, this light fixture is placed 6 times. That sort of detail work ends up making a noticeable difference on the finished car. The not so good news, during a review of the model, Lewis noticed a tiny detail was missing, two phillips head screws per light fixture. The screws were nothing too difficult, no real reason to recreate the threads of the screw. What was required was a screw head and post that looked good placed on the light fixture. Now considering the final size of the screw with reference to the car, I probably used too many polygons to model the screw, but here's what I came up with.

Textured wire-frame view before Sub-dividing

Texture view after sub-dividing

I actually enjoyed the process of modeling the screw. I took a slightly different path than the one provided by Lewis, but that's the beauty of his tutorials. At this stage of the model, he still gives you wonderful ideas and tricks of the trade, but he has shown you enough of the tools that you can strike out on your own if you feel so inclined. That's what I did with the screw. For the most part, I liked the results I achieved. I still struggle with cutting holes in curved Sub-D surfaces, maybe one day I'll find a good set of rules to follow. 

These screen shots are not full renders, just the texture views from Lightwave's Modeler.

Phillips Screws placed on the Rear Light Fixtures

Lightwave Modeler Navigation - Respect for Shift+A

Hi, this is a simple navigation tutorial. So, if you already know your way around Lightwave3D's Modeler, I'll warn you ahead of time you probably know this and will blame me for wasting your time;0) That said, I had missed the boat on this one and as a result was spending way too much time rotating, zooming and panning this way and that trying to get my model in an orientation that helped me either tweak something or just view my poly flow for issues. So, for the one or two people who like me haven't yet discovered the magic of "Fit Selected, shortcut key Shift+A," this video is for you.

I created this model based on a tutorial by Lewis.
You can pick up the tutorial from Foundation 3D here.

Modeling holes in a Sub-D mesh.

Lightwave 3D technique for creating holes in a curved sub-division surface.

The idea is based on a Modo tutorial by Richard Yot and makes use of the recent Lightwave tool - Heat Shrink. The video begins using the technique to create a hole in a flat surface. There are plenty of other great methods (check out William Vaughan's site) for creating holes in a flat surface, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to see the technique used in different scenarios.

Final render of an audio-technica ATM63

I added the microphone label and a bit of blue to the back light. I think I'll stop with this render and call it a day. The ATM63 is an older audio-technica microphone. The one I have is quite banged up and showing its age, but check out their site. They have lot's of great gear.

audio-technica ATM63 - Modeled and rendered in Lightwave 3D

.

Ficus Leaf modeled and rendered in Lightwave3D

I need some environmental elements for a scene I'm dreaming up...where to start? I have a ficus tree right behind my desk and those leaves look interesting. Okay, I'll give it a shot.

Pretty straight forward but I liked the look of it. Used Lightwave's Depth of Field because I hadn't really experimented with it. With basic settings, the blur was fairly noisy, but I increased Maximum Samples to 32, turned on the Soft Filter and Adaptive Sampling. My Adaptive Sampling threshold was 0.01. Not sure if this makes sense but I added Photoreal motion blur with 6 Motion Blur Passes and it seemed to remove a lot of the DOF noise.

Oh, and one more thing that helped...under the Render Tab, I checked Noise Reduction.

Ficus leaf modeled and rendered in Lightwave3D