Hi folks,
I’ve been trying to practice modelling by tackling household objects. For this one I attempted to model 0.14L really useful boxes (RUBS. I found these quite difficult, especially the handle cut out of the lid.
I am relatively pleased with the results, but I did encounter a lot of issues with bevels and subsequent inability to smooth shade properly. Most of the box is modelled from a single round cube, with the odd boolean cut here and there to tackle some of the more awkard handle bits. The handles, honeycomb base pattern, and lid are separate objects. getting the initial shape was probably most awkward, in the end I used a round cube and cut the top and bottom off. Trying to bevel a normal cube gave strange results. The handle cut outs around the lid were also especially awkward, so I just created new objects for these and boolean cut/attached. As you can see however, this caused an issue in the render in that they are now darker.
I’m sure in some cases I could have reduced the total faces/cuts. I’m not sure what caused the issue with the lack of smooth shading in places, adding a subsurf made this worse too.
I’ll need to add a more realistic plastic material and perhaps add some scratches etc., but I am pleased that these look at least like a knock-off.
Has anyone else tried making something like this? What would you do differently?
Quick render:
Topo:
For these types of mostly flat objects with bevels you should not just use smooth shading, you use the Auto-Smooth with either:
- Harden Normals setting in the Bevel modifier
- Weighted Normals modifier at the end of modifier stack, possibly even with the Face Influence checkbox turned on (and generating face influence with the Bevel modifier)
That said, bevels may still create some shading issues which can be mitigated by adding support loops or by making destructive bevels and fixing any overlaps, etc.
Simply adding a subsurf wouldn’t work in most cases if you have ngons, as subsurf would try to pinch or overlap them. Adding some guidance cuts may help against that though.
2 Likes
Hi Stan, thanks for the advice. I’ll have a look into that (although I don’t know if I want to remodel this again just yet!). Definitely something I’ll need to read up on for the next project.
You don’t need to “remodel” anything to take Stan’s advice. The shot as-rendered now is acceptable to my eye. The real thing, after all, is “injection-molded plastic!”
I was about to ask about weighted normals, but finally found it. They really know how to hide things…
I tried modifying the mesh but at this stage it looks worse with weighted normals (unless I add lots of inset faces to keep some of the hard edges). Played around with various settings but could not quite match my original look. I think the problem is that here I made the mesh on the basis of smooth shading - the topology works this way, but it causes more hassles the other way. Next time I try to model something like this, I’ll start from the ground up with weighted normals. On a small test mesh it gave good results far quicker than what I did here.
