Here is a project I’ve been working on for the last few days. It’s my first real foray into a more complete use of blender and more complex meshes. It is also the first time I’ve used the node system on my own. All told, I probably sunk about 14 hours into it, 12 modelling and 2 texturing and compositing. I’m fairly happy with the results! There are multiple angles included on this post.
Please give me any tips and suggest improvements that you may see! I’ve also included the original .blend file, so if you have time to take a look at that I would be majorly appreciative. For those who do look, a few things to note: I used a fair amount of booleans, n-gons, and tris. I recognize that in many circles this is not good, specifically for those looking to rig and animate. However, given this is geometric modelling and that this will likely never leave Blender, I felt it was ok here. However, if you have a method or tutorial to achieve the same results without booleans and n-gons, I would love to hear it! Other than that, tell me how I did and what I can do to improve my modelling skills!
Some things I’d recommend, though, would be to make the edges less sharp. Nothing in real life has such sharp edges. And it’s always good practice to model at the right scale. At the moment the sight in your .blend is more than 10 m tall. That has an effect on the lighting and the shadows. Because the render engine calculates the shadows compared to the scale.
Thank you for your feedback! I never would have known about the scale factor, so I’ll definitely drop it down to a more appropriate size! And how should I go about softening up the edges? Would a small bevel be enough to achieve decent effect? Thank you again! It means a lot to receive any feedback!
I tried it with your file. For many parts you can use a bevel modifier with a small bevel and a suitable segment count. For other parts this modifier produces undesired results because of the geometry. In these cases you could bevel the selected edges in edit mode with CTRL + B. Just drag the mouse after you hit CTRL + B with the necessary edges selected.
I don’t see the need for a subsurface modifier. If you want to use this modifier you’d have to add several control edge loops and I’m not sure if that would work everywhere because of the geometry and the ngons that the boolean operations gave you.
Thank you both for your input! It means a whole lot! I’ll definitely be putting some bevels on all the sharp edges, as well as shrinking down the whole model to a more reasonable size! (I’m on vacation right now, so I won’t be able to try this until next week.) I’m really appreciative of these ideas! And thank you for the comment on my lens shader! To be fully honest, I’m kind of faking it. It only works well at certain angles and you need to adjust a few values to achieve a nice effect every time you move the camera, but if it looks good in the final render I guess who cares!
