Trying to replicate This
What’s the best way to go about this? I started with shrink wrapping squares of detailed areas of the box guide, then adding geometry after applying the shrink wrap? Issue I then run into is the separate squares and the amount of lines (Ctrl+R) running through them having a gap inbetween them. Should I just have them meet out of sight or should I Boolean a majority of this all? Haven’t gotten into Boolean.
I wouldn’t model that for subDiv, I’d bake all the bevels in there. Just get a good enough amount of Segments on the BevelModifiers. Create holes with enough verts/segments to support the resolution (view distance) you’ll need it in.
Booleans all the way. And keep it as Non-Destructive workflow (as much as you can), so you can make edits as you progress!
That would be a good project for testing some of the boolean addons out there.
I already made a post about the main options here:
Make each element that is a separate object in reality a separte object in your model as well.
Use whatever technique is the best for each separate object. Personally I´d probably poly-by-poly most of these objects for subdiv but some of them might be better constructed in other ways.
We’d probably need to see your blend-file to know how and why you’re using shrink-wrapping … and the other issues you’re talking about here.
Groups are a very handy feature: put all of the objects relating to the same “thing” into the same group. I also suggest using an Empty as the grand-parent of the entire “thing,” giving that empty a consistent name, so that you know that when you want to grab the “thing” and move it around you do so by moving the empty and everything else comes with it.
This looks like a project where the hardops and boxcutter addons would shine, or in other words, boolean workflow instead of subd. If you don’t want to spend money on addons, make every part a seperate object as already suggested, use a bevel modifiers to break hard edges, weighted normals modifier to make shading look right, and booleans for modeling.
If you run into troubles with booleans messing up topology or giving shading artefacts, just add some loopcuts in the area of the boolean operators.
Even though you don’t want to invest in addons right now, have a look at the YT videos of masterxeon 1001 working with hardops and boxcutter. You can basically do everything without the addons (with quite more effort), and you can learn a ton from these videos and boolean workflow.