crazy block

[Tim Nelson]

Hello all...

 

I was wondering, how would you approach this block here? I'm currently painting a displacement map, but its really painstaking and I have a ways to go. Would this be something easily poly modeled? I wouldn't mind giving that a try either. Plus I think if its modeled its going to render faster than displacement.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

I think I would model it.

 

It seems like you should be able to assign it to the background and quickly trace it, then push and pull the vertices to get the rough shape. Then go back and chaumfer edges, and add any extra detail.

[Tim Nelson]

I think I would model it.

 

It seems like you should be able to assign it to the background and quickly trace it, then push and pull the vertices to get the rough shape. Then go back and chaumfer edges, and add any extra detail.

So, by tracing it, you mean with splines? Then you convert it to a surface or what? Thanks!

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

I drew a square, and then used the cut tool to slice the face according to the image. I then selected vertices, and moved them back and forth to get the depth. Then chaumfered the edges to smooth it.

 

It is not fully detailed, and not super sophisticated, but with a good texture, it may work for you. I wouldn't think anyone would call you out on something being slightly off with it.

 

I have about 15 minutes invested in it.

[Tim Nelson]

Nice! I have about a day invested in it so far. I think I'm on the right track with modeling it, but I think your cutting method is way faster. I'm basically just working my way out with polygons. Not the fastest for sure, but its something I need to get better at anyways. I like how you were able to chamfer yours at the end though. I might resort to a vray edges texture to smooth it.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

I wonder if you weld the vertices when you are done if you will be able to slightly round the corners?

 

If I were going to build it for real, I might try tracing it in Illustrator, then bringing in the splines, welding them, converting to a editable poly, and then moving the points into position for depth.

 

But I see intero is reading this thread. He could probably build it better and faster than either of us.

[Koper]

you should try the nvidia normals map creator

 

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/photoshop_dds_plugins.html#downloads

 

it should do a gr8 job with that block.

[Peter M. Gruhn]

Aye, depending on how close you need to be in the end you may want to keep the model or make a normal map out of it. I'm getting good results modeling geometry (either by hand or with displacement) and then baking a normal map for my current project.

[Tim Nelson]

Here's what I ended up with. Its not perfect, but for the distance that we'll be at it will work fine. Plus its only 524 faces so thats good. The smooth edges come from the VrayEdges bump.

[Gus_Rayvus]

nice one!