I have made this car so far, by extruding and moving vertices/edges/faces
(thanks to Exile420 for the advice, has proven valuable)
[ATTACH=CONFIG]214463[/ATTACH]
[ATTACH=CONFIG]214464[/ATTACH]
Now it is time to start adding some details. The lights’ and exhausts’ openings, the intakes, etc etc.
Therefore I should apply the subsurf, right ?
Wrong, because if I do, then how will I join the two “halves” later, when there will be many vertices ?
(my Mirror modifier has created two separate halves, they are not united. Is this supposed to work like that ?
Anyway I do not mind to join vertices later manually, but as long as there is not a million of them ! )
On the other hand, there is no way to apply the Mirror now, too much work left to be done.
So Im kind of stuck… perhaps I should just go on by adding detail manually wherever needed. I use Ctrl+R and
“Inset faces” (splits a quad into five quads, its nice). Any other good trick to add detail where needed ?
But I prefer to add the details AFTER (*) subsurf modifier, so that I have absolute control on what is going on.
Hi :). You can pretty easily make the mirror modifier join the vertices in the middle allowing you to apply the subsurf. If you select “clipping” and then drag the inner edge towards the mirrored duplicate, the vertices should stop at the mirror line and will then join with the mirrored vertices.
Hope this helps
One more thing about the Mirror modifier: It must be BEFORE the Subsurf Modifier which has a tendency to “pull the corners” and therefore prevents the Mirror from seeing them as needing to be merged.
As for adding details, I don’t see another solution besides loop cuts, insets and extrusions. Of course, the subsurf will change your mesh but, unless you want to do its job by hand, you will use it any way… So, cope with it.
Use more loop cuts and some crease to prevent the subsurf from doing stuff you don’t want. And don’t forget that you can always check what the subsurf does if you set the preview level to the same value than the render level. It doesn’t matter if the UI becomes sluggish or worse ; you can always revert to a lower preview level after having checked the result.
You can also do some quick renders. Your scene is certainly not done yet then parent 2 lights to a camera, zoom in on the details which interest you and take a small picture (with the default material for even more speed). You like it. Good, go on. You don’t. Change it. Simple as that. If you use Cycles, just cut yourself a tiny viewport in a corner and set it to Render Mode to check the result. Even better!
One thing that you must keep in mind: The beauty of the final image is much more important than the beauty of the mesh… Well… As long as you don’t violate the 3 rules of topology: 1 Quads. 2 Quads too. 3 More Quads.
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