Greetings!!
I working on making a Blender model of my Sun Ultra 5 Workstation webserver.
I’m a long way from finishing. One main issues I have is how do I make holes for floppy drive anf CDROM drive?
I’m using Blender to Model and Light Flow to render.
heres the WIP pic. http://supergeek.homeunix.org/blender/ultra5_LightFL
To begin with, take some time to study the front of the computer and ask yourself where all the bends and corners are. Wherever you have a corner or a crease or a bend, you are going to need to have some verticies to model. Decide what you want to model and what would be better represented by image textures.
I would probably work the front by itself. Once the front is modelled, you can easily extrude the sides to finish the box. Subdivide your front plane and begin moving verticies around. w-key subdivide, x-key to delete faces/edges/verts, E-Key to F-Key and shift-F to build edges and faces.
You can Place your image in the background and use it to trace over.
or
Don’t model anything, just Map a Photo onto the front of your Box. You will be amazed at how convincing it can be.
or
Start with the holes and work your way out with extruding and scaling
or
Trace your Background picture with bezier curves (H-Key and V-key will switch your handle types)
Good Luck… The Build a castle tutorial at www.ingiebee.com is a great basic modeling tools tutorial
What if I subdivide and use Boolean?
or
Will making the front with Surfaces first with cut outs (Kind like car modelling) the convert to mesh and weld to a open front box?
I don’t mind too much work.
I started to make the vent wholes in the front panel, by creating a nurb circle then poly it and scaled, then adding bunch of nurb circles inside, then converting them all to mesh and F-keying them. It all most broke my box to a Halt. It work but I screwed up, (Not saving).
Thanks agian
I played around with your file to give you a head start. What I did was add the image to the background and began at the left side with a plane. I extruded it to the right lining up the vert with the image. I then sized it vertically to fit the drive bays and extruded up and then down. Next I made acopy and began to build the drive bays by extruding. This all took about 5 minutes.http://home.att.net/~holywordkids/ULTRA5.BLEND
mthoenes,
Thank You. That was a most important Lesson. What you just taught me solved alot of my other modelling road blocks.
When I finish the workstation I will post it.
Thanks again.
Using curve circles would probably be the best way to actually model the holes if you really need to model them - Since a curve shape inside a curve shape gives you a hole automatically. You can give the curve model depth and bevel with Ext1 and Ext2 buttons. Leave it as curves if you don’t need to convert to a mesh for some other reason. The curve is a lot less load on your system than the mesh would be.
You may find that a good image texture looks as good.