Help! (please!) - Basic? Modelling of Chair

[AlanSpaceAge]

Hi Guys,

 

I've been scratching my head for far too long now trying to figure out the best way to model a mesh back-rest for an office chair.

 

My modelling skills are fairly basic - I have attached an image of what I currently have and what I would like to achieve.

 

Ideally I'd want a tight mesh wrapped tight around the entire frame (which i have managed to model), which is seen in my viewpoints image.

 

The real-life chair in question is also attached.

 

Any help whatsoever would be hugely appreciated.

 

Regards,

Alan

[SandmanNinja]

Loft?

 

Make the edge-on shape with one spline

then the path with another spline

 

Just my first reaction.

 

You could probably make a thin box and use soft-selection and surface deformation (or FFD) deform it into shape.

[Brian Smith]

you might want to ask Alex Gorbonuv, a furniture modeling expert (a member here), but my first guess would be to select a loop of edges around the inside or outside of chair back, turn it into a mesh and use FFD like Joel stated.

[RobNJ73]

Or maybe even build the back of the chair as one solid piece and handle the mesh look of it through opacity maps.

 

Though the effectiveness of that will depend on what kind of role the chair will play in your shot.

[AlanSpaceAge]

Thanks for your suggestions. Will have to try it out within the next week or so when I have time.

 

Will post up the results

 

Cheers

 

Alan

[AlanSpaceAge]

Ok, I have managed to achieve what I wanted with the mesh.

 

I believe I used loft to create the frame seen in my first post. (Lonmg time since this was started).

 

I then made a duplicate of the frame and selected the outer polys, and deleting the inner ones - as Brian suggested.

 

Tedious task of then welding all the inner vertices to produce the mesh.

 

Scaled this up by about 1% so that it fits tightly around the frame. (Not quite as tight as I would have liked, a bit of tweaking would sort this out. You can just see the edge of the mesh spilling over the edge of the frame.)

 

Opacity map applied for mesh look.

 

Images attached.

Thanks again for your suggestions - much appreciated.

 

Alan