Hello, this is my first attemp to model in Blender. I used 3ds max a bit so I have a light knowledge about modeling.
What I’m doing here is a tower for my castle, I started here because it is one of the corners and because it’s the easiest tower to do.
I started box modeling, but to do the windows I used boolean operations (mostly difference), I know it is not the best way to model but modelling everything would take me way too much time.
In solid it looks really good but when I smooth the surface it makes strange shadows in all directions.
I did CTRL + N to recalculate normals outside but that doesn’t help at all.
¿should I give up and strart doing it all over again?
Nice model uou already know the basics pretty well! I would like to see a render of it maybe you could put on Ambient occlusion for the render of this one do delete all your lights it will give better result.
About the smooth thing: I dont really see the problem cause it wont give any mistakes when rendering does it? then it should be oke. You should also put on auto Smooth on 80 To smooth things more up will give much better result.
Thanx a lot for the answers! I already did the CTRL+N to recalculate normals outside, and deleted the non-manifold faces (there was a few) but it still looks the same. Maybe this images could help.
You don’t really want the thing to be too smooth, as in the second picture.
Try putting some texture on it. Make it start to look like stone… experiment with “bump maps” which will make the surface appear to be irregular. I think that, when you begin to do that, the other artifacts are going to cease to be visible.
During your initial modeling, worry more about getting the relative proportions correct; the roughed-in lighting model looking good; the camera(s) placed where you want. Then, you can start looking at ways to make each shot look more realistic.
Maps can give you a lot of apparent-detail at much less computational expense than a fancy, highly-detailed geometry. If the camera and the lights aren’t moving, then you can positively get away with murder … just like the special-effects crews did in early sci-fi films. (In a situation other than this exercise,) You could literally take a picture of a real castle somewhere, doodle it up in Photoshop/GIMP, stick it in the background on a flat-plane “scrim,” and arrive at a result that will work perfectly well in a pinch, buying you the human-time you need to focus your attention on those parts of the same shot that demand more attention. The slang word is “cheating a shot,” but of course, it isn’t cheating.
Recalculating normals won’t help you.
The reason is because of all the triangles.
These triangles are created probably thanks to the booleans.
They are known to mess up your designs real bad.
All looks quite good in solid mode but one golden rule:
Triangles + Subsurfacing = Hell.
See if you can still convert those tri’s and next time use booleans only if you have to.
The new boolean modifiers are somewhat improved but can still be nasty.
P
hanx again. You are right, vliegtuig, it was because of all the triangles.
I tried to manually get rid of those but the mesh is just too complex and it will take me forever so… it seems that I have to try some other technique to make the mesh. It´s a shame because booleans are a very usefull tool to model.
I will try doing those “windows” first and then spin and fill all by hand, that way I can make the roof also and add it as a single piece.
Let’s say you have a cylinder and you extrude it so it looks like the basic shape of your tower.
Use Ctrl+R to have loop subdivisions. This is better then just subdividing the whole lot 3 or 4 times because you’ll only create the vertices you really need.
Create a few of them and move them in a position so that you get the outlines of the windows you want to make.
Then apply the edge loop by entering.
You’ll have an extra row of vertices you can play with.
Once you have the outlines for your windows go into face mode.
Select the faces that are to be your windows and delete them.
Nice cuts without tris.
Select the whole cylinder and extrude inwards to create a thick wall.
If you go subsurf on this one you’ll need to create some extra edge loops to have cornered walls isntead f rounded ones.
If all of this sounds chinese to you I’d be happy to give you a small tut on edge loops but I’ll need some time.
P
Allright, I’m not giving up on this one so I decided to do a fresh start.
I started with the tower base and then made two windows. Then the most difficult part was to create the top of the tower that has those weird columns (I don’t know how to describe it) so for that I used loops and then deleted edges and added vertices. I didn’t extrude because I didn’t knew how to extrude on a global axis but didn’t care either because I just copied the vertices and moved them arround then build all the faces one by one
It was kinda boring but it took me little time (about three hours) to get everything done.
OK, here are the images, of course everything you have to say is most welcomed.
Press Z to extrude along global Z, X to extrude along global X, and Y to extrude along global Y.
Oh, and the model looks good to start too. :)[/quote]
And to drag along the local axis, press Z, X, or Y twice. Sometimes the global and local axis are the same. This is for use with things like diagonal peices of wood. But for the local axis to be diagonal, the object has to be rotated in object mode.
P.S. You model is supurb for a beginner (the second one). Very clean and nice.
Thanx for all your answers!
reaper, I’m not following any texturing tutorial for now, first I want to learn how to model really cool stuff.
Since I’m kinda freezed with the tower I started making the entrance of the castle. For this I started with a beizer line for the arc and then converted it to mesh and started extruding the edges. Then I made those two little towers with another beizer line (this time spinned), with the resulting mesh I did a hole on it and extrude inwards. Then cutted it like a piece of cake and spinned it again, so the hole was repeated. The result was quite dissapointing because there were some faces missing and I’m not happy about how the shadows are working because the holes are shining were it’s supposed to be dark.
Anyways here are some pics.
Thanx again!
It’s been a while since my last reply ok, I haven’t done much yet but I finally finished the entrance and made the windows of what will be the main house of the castle. Now that I’ve got the windows I’ll Start the lateral walls of the house and I hope to get it done relatively quick.
Robin: Thanks for the comment I actually haven’t noticed it. I don’t know if I will be able to fix that since those two little towers are actually very high poly and it would take me too much time but I’ll do it if I can. Thanx again for the comment.
Slowly making progress here, I’m making one of the towers for the main house. I’m trying to make it simple but still appealing.
Please let me know what you think.
