Modeling plugs on phone

Support Modeling
,
#1

Hello,

I have tried to model this phone in the past, but had difficulty with the plugs particularly. I have little experience with hard surface modeling. On that front I have some questions; Does one use subdivision surfaces on a hard surface model or do they just use smoothing (Auto-Smooth)? Or do people only set smooth to the parts that they want smooth? Back to the original question…

I have this phone with these plugs on the bottom. There is a chrome material around the plugs and surrounding the phone.

When I try to model the plugs I get some problems on the resulting mesh and on the resulting material assignment.

bad-chrome-phone_II
bad-chrome-phone_II742×317 139 KB

bad-chrome-phone

As you can see the chrome is not a nice bead but rather some distorted circle, I never got to the other plug because I could not get the headphone jack to work, but you can see the buckling/puckering on usb plug. There are bevels on the inside of that to accentuate the sharp shape. The subdivisions are set to 2.

As far as an alternative I can think of using booleans to cut the holes but then I would not use subdivision surfaces I think. Or maybe I could use a UV map to place the materials but I don’t think that would work. What I was trying last was to model this as a separate part, which may be the best way. I think I would still have problems with puckering and buckling though.

Thanks for any advice

#2

Here is a solution that doesn’t give any pinching:

1
1700×1758 238 KB

Square holes keep rounding after adding subsurf
#3

Hey, thanks for the reply. The solution works well, I still have to mess with the edges to get the chrome to be right, and I didn’t copy the solution exactly, I seem to have mismatched edge numbers. Still gotta fiddle with it.

bad-chrome-pinching-solution_I bad-chrome-pinching-solution_II bad-chrome-pinching-solution_III bad-chrome-pinching-solution_IV

#4

maybe share your file (with the chrome material) so that I give it a try

#5

Ok, thanks.

phone-lgk30-upload.blend (1.9 MB)

#6

I don’t see any problem except you have assigned 3 materials to this part of your phone: material.001, material.004 and chrome

#7

Yeah, I have been a bit sloppy. I’m glad you looked at it though, just to check my work. The significant problem that I think is largely fixed is that the chrome has a nice shape. That’s what I have to tinker with. You can see the picture above to see what it was. Thanks again.

edit: you can see in that file that I have not yet assigned the chrome around the usb/power plug.