How would you build this piece of furniture?

[danb4026]

I still have a lot of difficulty building "soft" pieces like this. My organic style modeling sucks. I need to put a bunch of these in a clients scene, but after going thru my own attempt at modeling, I threw up my hands and figured I would ask the pros.

 

Could someone give me a bit of advice as to how to tackle it? thx

[Bruce Hart]

One way is you could try building a base shape in Max and taking it into Zbrush or Mudbox. After sculpting in all those creases you can then export out an adaptive displacement map which can then be applied to your low poly mesh back in Max and displaced at render time. I found this tutorial on character modelling which helped me and can be applied to some Arch Viz stuff:

 

edit: OK CGA won't let me post web links so go to

www dot jhotun dot com and go to the tutorial section on "the hunt"

ZBrush also contains tutorials on this in the documentation.

 

Without ZBrush, perhaps you could use UVUnwrap to export out a texture to paint your own displacement. I'm not saying this is easy, but give it a shot...

[danb4026]

Bruce, I actually have zbrush, but have yet to use it. This maybe an excuse to learn, just not sure I have the time. I will take a look at the tut you are referring to. Thanks for the reply.

[Stan Zaslavsky]

if your budget allows it - you could always organise someone who specialises in furniture creation to get it done for you and then your client would get a much more professional looking piece and probably in shorter time too

[danb4026]

Budget doesn't allow me to sub out. It's hard enough getting work for myself and getting paid.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

The legs may be the hardest part to get right. The rest has room for forgiveness.

 

But in all seriousness, I think I would model the rough shape, and use reactor maybe some of Simcloth, or another cloth modeling tool to drop the rough object, which will refine the modeling shape. Then take that shape, and bring it into ZBrush to pull out the wrinkles, and add the level of detail that wil set it above other pieces of furniture.

 

it has been awhile since I have created a shapoe like this, and I haven't used ZBrush for it, but I think it could really make the shape special, especially if you have the rough shape from max.

 

Edit: By drop, I mean move into the air, and use gravity to drop it to the ground, and give it the slight bulging, and relaxed corner look.

Edited June 24, 2009 by Crazy Homeless Guy

[danb4026]

Travis, do u mean actually drop the shape, or to use

a cloth modifier to drop a fabric on the shape?

[Koper]

I would just use the the garment maker with cloth&reactor.With the garment maker you can then later select the seams and then create splines to model the seams properly.

[dean@pikcells]

We've just done loads of furniture, and I believe the best way and most realistic way, is to create displacement maps.

You have to unwrap the model, it's worth doing this well first time, then paint your displacement map in photoshop.

 

Dean

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Travis, do u mean actually drop the shape, or to use

a cloth modifier to drop a fabric on the shape?

 

It has been awhile since I have done something like this, but I think a good way to get a general shape of something like this is to quickly model the inside foam piece, then build a loose fabric shell over the top, including the dog eared corners. Make the shell a cloth, and the foam rigid. Then drop together on a ground plane. The gravity will make the dog ears droop down, and also give a slouch to the overall shape.

 

I would then take that shape into ZBrush, and add the extra layer of folds and wrinkles.

 

I made the pillows that are in the attached image sometime around 2006 using a similar method. It was the first time I tried it like that, but thought the results were ok. I would probably push it even further if I were to do it today, but for a first try using that method, I was happy.

[danb4026]

Well, I found a Togo chair (that's what the piece is) on Turbosquid and bought it for $25. Solves that problem and looks quite good actually.

 

I am going to build some pillows for the pieces using your method. Thx!!

[Thablanch]

Did this exact chair like 2 years ago..

Poly in max, little bit of zbrush, and coming back to max with the displacement map. Did the job quite well.

[danb4026]

Although I bought the model on Turbosquid because of time constraints, I have been playing around with zbrush and going thru their included tutorials to get some understanding.

 

Why use the displacement map rather than the model itself out of zbrush? Is it because of the poly count?

[Thablanch]

 

Why use the displacement map rather than the model itself out of zbrush? Is it because of the poly count?

 

Yes. Polycount can get quite something if you subdivide it a couple times in Zbrush.

 

Lets pretend that your seat makes 9 million poly, and you have 6 in your scene, your Max file could choke, only because of theses seats....