I was bored at work one night, and realized that I had a mine of a project to be tapped right under my nose. Looking at the station where we make salads for our guests, I realized that it would make a great scene with a combination of simple and complex objects that would be great for modeling and texturing practice. This is just the first part of the modeling here with most of the containers. Still need to do the utensils, such as tongs and ladles, and the food items, but I like how this is looking so far.
The container on the wall seems to be missing a mount such as plate for bolts to connect to the wall. As well I realize this is only beginning modeling but the counter doesn’t have smooth shading turned on which makes me think you might be using far more polys than necessary to make the other meshes appear smooth?
I like that you have a combination of hard and soft edges, little things like that really add to the believablity.
Thanks for catching that, Jeremy. I simply forgot to do the smooth shading one the counter. Seems I forgot to turn it on.
Actually, the bracket for the container on the wall is welded on, not screwed on. But I do need to add in some screws for the backplash that is being held up to the wall. I just haven’t added that detail yet.
As far as too many edges, I’ve got less than 9K vertices with what’s here so far. Pretty much all that is there are the ones to define the edges. A subsurf helps give the rounded edges with loop cuts to define the corners, one on either side of an edge.
Still, I have a long way to go with this one before it’s done! Really, I only have about 4 of 5 more “simple” things to model. Most everything I have left, I haven’t quite figured out how I’m going to do yet. Particularly the lettuce, though I may use a technique I saw on a tutorial from Blender Guru or Blender Cookie (I forget which one it was) on modeling grass.
Well, Jeremy, I stand corrected… I took a look this evening, and while it is welded at the wall, it’s welded to a piece that is bolted into the wall. Guess I’ll have to incorporate that into my model. Then again, I can probably eliminate a number of vertices around that area on the back wall
Just curios, what does the real wield look like? At the moment it currently doesn’t look like you have any wield made into the model, unless you were thinking of faking it with normals or somthing to that extent. If you add some metaballs to the scene they will stick together and make a fairly nice looking bead (not to say it would be perfect, as someone who has use a number of different wielding techniques a good wield is generally concave, but out of the box metaballs will give you a convex result since they are round. However this can be fixed by converting them to a mesh by pressing alt+C then quickly adjusting with proportional editing by pressing the letter o. Due to the scale it may not be worth doing it but it’s a handy tip to know)
I think I was just going to do it in texturing rather than the modeling. It doesn’t need to be real detailed since it’s not going to be a real close up shot on it.
Okay… One of the biggest things I need to work on is the salad, and I was trying to think of the best way to do that. My thoughts were to do several lettuce, a few carrot strip and cabbage pieces, then use an emitter to randomly mix them together (weighted a bit more toward the lettuce). The thing I need to figure out is how to get objects within the containers so that it looks natural. Am I thinking about this in the right way? Because I think “duplicating and placing” each piece would be extremely tedious and unnecessarily time consuming. It’s one thing to do so with the olives, tomatoes, onions, and peppers, because you’re only looking about 15-30 or so (a lot, but still fairly manageable) but with the lettuce, you’re talking a whole lot more. So, any suggestions or am I thinking along the right lines?
I tried this earlier and one test sent the objects off in all different directions and another just seemed to make everything bounce around, which could have been a totally different thing, but the individual emitted objects didn’t seem to be lasting as long as they should have been. I really don’t need the animation for anything other than giving a more natural placement. If I"m doing it this way, would it be best to emit from a plane?
You will have to manually adjust to look right one way or another, having them placed randomly by the computer can look strange. But it may help to use an array and the rigid body sim.
For example you want a bowl with carrots. Place 1 carrot (or a group) above the bowl and apply an array modifier. Then you can run the sim to drop them all into the bowl. If set up right this should also prevent objects from intersecting.
@Jeremy, I had thought about using an array modifier, but thought that might be too tedious a method. I’ll keep it in mind.
One reason I had thought about the possibility of using an “emitter” was I had seen some tutorials where they took several grass blades and set up a system where it mixed them randomly and could be weighted so that certain kinds would show up more and could get some random variation on the sizes of the emitted blades. Now, this was done on a hair emitter, which wouldn’t work for what I need, but I was wondering if a similar thing could be done to “dump” a salad in to the bin and bowl. The effect I’m after is very similar with several different kinds of lettuce, a few carrot variation, a few cabbage variations, weighted toward the lettuce, obviously, but with random sizes on the individual pieces.
@Bossentrenders, I might have to keep that in mind, but I’m not sure a cloth sim is really needed here. Or at least that was my first thought. But as I think about certain pieces and kinds of lettuce, that might be an effect I need, so thanks for that. Although, at the moment, I was considering the “how to” on creating the salad.
Once I have all the pieces, I could easily apply and tweak, and I expect to do that. Just trying to figure out how best to create the mix at this point.
The array takes a mere seconds to make and when coupled with rigid body physics is a quick and easy way of doing exactly what you described with dropping the veggies in. The other alternative you mention is achieved with weight painting? You would get some pretty strange results if you try using that, unless you wanted all your veggies to be glued to the side of the bowl or having geometry passing through each other!
And about the cloth sim, I would personally not do it but its up too you. In order to make it work you will need what i see as being an unnecessarily large poly count for your leaves in order to gain sufficient physical accuracy. Couple this with processing time for the sim and if you don’t have a very high poly count add in time doing manual tweaks and it would have been better just to place each leaf by hand in the first place.
Actually, the point of the cloth sim is to have a small poly count; thus making a realistic tomato simulation (it’s not really supposed to look like your grandma’s sweater when it falls of the bed) . Plus, even me on my slow old computer can do a cloth sim, so I don’t think that’s a main problem problem here.
Its just that there is no point for this particular application. Salad leaves are for the most part crispy and retain there shape (Refer to this Google image search, notice that there is basically no noticeable deformation). Any deformation that may occur would only be apparent to the modeler making cloth sim unnecessary. I would only warrant the cloth sim if the scene was that of aged rotting salad which would be limp.
Based of the models so far, if this was fresh salad with noticeable “Cloth” property’s it would be a stylistic choice. I say based of the model because the containers are not of sufficient scale to produce weighted effect. Also at this moment in time we don’t actually even know if the salad in the bottom of the bowls will be visible, it could very well be a metal bowl as too glass or plastic (assuming the salad will be in the bowls).
You are right, it can be done with relative ease, But is it worth even a small amount of time to do things of questionable visual impact when there is a list of other important assets to produce? Whatever the outcome may be we will see from @gradyp soon, its all his project after all :yes:
(Then again we know very little about this salad there are many types and factors involved, if it were to have a thick sauce with chunky veggies cloth could be an excellent choice. Although for my own salads I never have it chunky and usually season with some type of oil or vinegar which doesn’t tend to weigh much, not to mention different types of leaf depending on where this person lives. Were are communicating on an almost world wide scale here)
