Indenting ply for upolstry buttons

[philvanderloo]

What would be the best method for getting some pretty precise button indentations on this sofa arm?

I tried paint deformation push pull but with the mesh showing it's hard to see the end result. And there are so many polys the brush tool hops around and doesn't move smoothly.

Soft selecting vertices was the best so far but it seems like there's a more controllable way.

[Francisco Penaloza]

Soft selection will be your best bet. The only thing you'll need to increase the mesh subdibs and here is where thins can get crazy, depending of how detailed you want to go you may need to use a very high subdibs and then maybe create a normal or displacement map to apply to a lower res mesh. Otherwise that seat will eat all the polygon count in your scene.

 

A combination of low polygon models with turbo smooth also may work, but again you may need to increase the subdibs to a decent number.

This solution wont be fast, other software such ZBrush, Mudbox, Modo or similar will do this type of task faster.

[beestee]

Poly modeling with turbosmooth would be the most controllable way to model this type of feature in Max, but it would likely require starting the model over to handle the process cleanly and consistently, particularly with understanding the effect of edge loops in conjunction with turbosmooth.

 

This video shows some of these methods in action:

 

Based on where you are at now, that seems to be the best place to start since the turbosmooth can be tailored to keep viewport interaction snappy while rendering perfectly smooth.

 

If you do get into modelling a lot of furniture you will definitely want to explore the sculpting tools Francisco mentioned, and possibly even Substance Painter or Quixel for material only approaches. It still amazes me what can be accomplished with

.