Good work, John

Not to complain about it, but the exporter in daz studio is less than perfect. I mean, it has all the options you would expect, but the way it formats the obj text is a little sloppy. Poser is even worse, but at least in my experience opening the obj in Blender will bring in diffuse, bump, and specular just fine. It won't import normal maps or some others, so you might have to connect those yourself. Also, the parameter values of the maps won't be the same, so there is a need to tweek the materials to get the look you need.

Thanks guys, I got it now. Are there any addons which use different algorythims? I've had unexpected results with the standard Bridge tools before, and wonder if there are alternatives for Blender?

Cybermonk posted at 12:34PM Fri, 22 July 2016 - #4276887

Oh man that poke tool is very cool and quick. I did it with extrude individual, scale a bit, and then collapse the faces. Also in blender when I tried to bridge both objects it made a mess if I tried to do it in one go.

Me too! Yea the poke tool is great. That worked very quick like in the Max video, but then I get hung up with the bridge tools. They just won't work in one go no matter what. I first selected all non-manifold edges, then I tried Bridge Edge Loops. That didn't work. So I tried Bridge in the LoopTools panel next, and that didn't work right either. Not sure what else to try? Clearly Blender's bridge tools aren't going to do it the same way as in the max tutorial, so not sure how to finish the model without adding a Solidify modifier, which doesn't look quite as good, or bridging each non-manifold edge one by one manually.

Thanks, Lobo. Yea things were crazy in personal life for a while, but i'm back to 3d now and hopefully gonna make some progress with some animation and renders.

Cybermonk posted at 8:18PM Thu, 21 July 2016 - #4276603

Nice tut dude. Gonna see if I can duplicate this in Blender.

Agreed. I did this in Blender using his first tutorial, but haven't figured out a way to get this one to work faster than that. Biggest problem for me is getting that X shape edges on each face of the cube at the beginning. I could do it with multiple cuts of course, but thats not any more efficient than the first method. Let me know if you figure out a way to do it faster than the first method in his original tut. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XatkYafoV0I

Thanks, Lobo. Looks good. Interesting to know there's still a following for static tutorials. I have to say I never really had much success with written tuts back in the day unless they were extremely detailed, which was rare. Years ago, first learning 3dsmax, I struggled trying to follow PDF or webpage tuts. I guess I'm a very visual person, and need to see someone working in the UI to totally grasp what they're doing, where the tools are, and all that. Once I learned the UI, I was able to go back and follow written tutorials, and found them more useful to me, but video really helped me along faster. I appreciate them a lot more now though, now that I know more of what i'm doing in the software.

About the extrude, you mean in 3dsmax, right? What about doing it with chamfering? I'd imagine the quad chamfer tool is perfect for that. It has a feature where you can push in or out on the edge after creating the chamfer. In Blender, you'd do this with Bevel I assume?

Awesome technique on those wrinkles and creases, lux! That's gonna look great with a soft leather material.

LuxXeon posted at 6:11PM Sun, 21 February 2016 - #4255075

Here's the video tutorial I promised. Hope you find it useful.

Bucky Ball from John Malcolm on Vimeo.

That's very simple, but really creative. Amazingly, you get the perfect circular shape with only 1 iteration of subdivision there.

John, where do you want pics sent? I bought your star pendant too, and have some pics for you.

Very interesting. I remember how to do something like this from a golf ball tutorial I did once.

false1 posted at 4:20PM Mon, 23 November 2015 - #4240426

maxxxmodelz posted at 8:53AM Mon, 23 November 2015 - #4240260

Looking good so far. One thing to keep in mind about the textures is that ornate wooden pieces like this usually get cut and carved along with the grain. Just something to keep in mind during texturing.

Thanks. That's good to know as I'm totally unfamiliar with woodworking. How would that translate to the model though? The real pieces like this I've seen seem to be one piece of wood. I'm loosing that effect by not having shaped the whole thing from a single mesh. My thought was that the grain would be vertical but since the piece is basically horizontal maybe I should rethink.

Do you happen to have a good image of one of these ornate pieces? If so, you can examine the wood grain patterns in it, and try to texture similarly. I think only very rare pieces like this would be carved from a solid wooden block, but here's a website that shows furniture that has been carved as a single piece. You can see how the grain behaves when it comes to curves, and how all the shapes follow the grain. Again, I think in your piece, the bottom platform, at least, would be a separate piece. If you want it to appear as one solid block, then the images on this page are good reference.

http://dornob.com/solid-wood-furniture-set-sculpted-desks-tables-chairs/

I believe Sketchup uses the Z-up coordinate system too.

Is this the one: http://www.amazon.com/Redragon-PERDITION-High-Precision-Programmable-Gaming/dp/B00GU8W5AE

It looks sci-fi and dangerous, but really cool. It's got extraordinary ratings too. Very cool.