Hi all, posting some wip images of my current project: I love the custom motorcycles from Cafe Racer Dreams (http://crdmotorcycles.com/en/cafe-racer-dreams/), so modeling one was the obvious thing to do
So far I’ve got the main parts (frame, engine, wheels, suspension), only smaller ones missing. Next part - carburator (quite difficult to find good reference).
@HawkerZA: no creasing, just adding support edges where needed (manually and bevel)
@SterlingRoth: material is nothing more than 50/50 glossy and diffuse bsdf mix, no complicated materials yet. Lighting comes from an emissive plane from above and one of Greg Zaal’s HDR images.
UV layout and proper textures will be tackled after modeling. I think I’ll stick with CynicatPro’s PBR materials (https://www.youtube.com/user/CynicatPro/videos)
The engine looks great. Regarding the engine how do you even think of where to start with it? Everything on it seems to merge beautifully in to their individual meshes, do you create the primitive shapes first and then re-topologise over the primitives?
thank you What helps me is trying to find a minimum face density which allows me to define all the details I want to pack into the geometry. I think about that a lot before I even start to model. I would estimate that gathering references and planning topology took the same amount of time - if not longer - than modeling. Regarding the modeling that’s basically classic box modeling… starting with primitives, joining them and using the knife tool a lot.
The workflow I used for the engine was starting with traces of the gaskets (you can find them on the picture below) which were aligned in the side view. From there, I modeled outwards, mostly extruding and adapting geometry on the fly.
Talking about it I cannot stress enough the importance of references, especially if you don’t have access to blueprints.
Here’s a screenshot of my references for the engine alone:
One more thing: Since I’m not bound to deadlines, I really like to model as clean as possible, avoiding any trickery. I don’t think it would be advisable to flesh out every small detail in a production setting where time is always short. Memory wise, I’m quite happy with the geometry right now: polycount is ~7000 for the valve cover, cylinder head and cylinder each and 15000 for the crankcase. The renderings were made with a subdiv modifier at level 2, totalling at about 600000 polys including all the small pieces.
Oh my word ! Behold a thing of beauty. I shudder to think how many poly’s I’ve used in my last model and it’s only 32mm in diameter, but least it has an Austrian flavor. LOL> Well done, lovely modelling.