Light stand (wip)

Question about booleans, this was made as 4 separate objects and then booleaned together. I didn't pay attention to the geometry before the boolean operation, I was thinking to leave them as separate objects and just group them together (parent-children), but I can see the scene list getting crazy with all the little pieces. This geometry won't be bended or modified in any significant way. I plan to animate the lightstand and perhaps bend the larger poles, and some IK for the legs perhaps, but these little pieces I don't think will be modified too much.

Question is.. should I worry about the geometry after the boolean operation not being too clean (all quads)? It seems to render just fine as is.

Thanks

Before boolean


After boolean




 
Alternatively you can use "Merge" instead of Boolean-add to make one object from many. I don´t think the indentation isn´t necessary at all. So merge might be adequate.
I´m more worried about this topology: But as long as it renders fine you can skip it of course.
Topology.jpg

Cheers
Frank
 
As Frank said, if it works it's no problem.

Building one isn't that hard though, if you have to.

Make sure you start with geometry divisible by 3.

TripodThingy.jpg
 
With stuff like this I'm always at a loss what to recommend. I'm usually for all-quad-topology but with stuff like this I find the 'what-works-is-okay'-approach acceptable.

Because with all-quad you can have a problem with stuff like this: the 5-star-poles you always get when extruding a block out of another at the start of the extruded block, as visible in zoo's picture. With catmull-clark those are usually not a problem, in my experience some 90 % of all cases. Here it isn't. Sometimes it can result in distorted geometry and I'm still not able to foresee when that will be. Just the other day I had a simple model where I thought I would get away with it, I got a visible crease. To get rid of something like that is difficult. There are several ways to do it, but you get always some changes in topology that can result in other visible problems and so on, and so on.

With simple objects as this I maybe wouldn't use subdivision at all. And then you don't have to care about all-quads anymore. It depends simple on the intended use of the object.

(Almost) all-quad or not, the geometry Frank pointed out I'd always repair, no matter what, one of the reasons that it's superfluous geo.

What first came to my mind is the poly-count of this prop. As I gather it's one of many objects in your planned picture, more or less in the background and probably not the focus of your picture. For that it maybe has too many polys, in the end very much depending of the memory your computer has and the other meshes you'll have in the scene.

For example you have that half ball in your cylinder, you just could delete the center polys and the loop above. I know, it's not much, some 56 polys (if I counted right), per side per 'thing' (I don't know how to call this holders). With a subdiv of 2, it's 896, with 3 such things, still only 5376 rendered polys (2 per thing, of which you have 3 if the new one is done the same way). It's nothing, but it's a small example. There are certainly other ways to cut it down without a loss of quality (even if it was the main motive of your picture).

If you have a scene consisting of a lot of such objects such a cutdown can amass to 100'000s of polys. So it's always something one should keep in mind.
 
Thanks for the thoughts Hasdrubal. This thing I'm doing is the first 3D thing I do in two years, I forgot how to use Cheetah but it's coming back. I'm doing this just for fun, and also to remember how to do these things. I'm trying to be more careful with the topology (avoiding having n-gons, trying to stay all quads), but at the moment I'm not worrying about poly count. I know it's going to be awefully inefficient and the final image will take longer than necessary to render, and if I decide to make an animation out of it it will come back to bite me in the ass lol.. but for the moment I'm just having fun and trying to find ways to model the things I want and make it look good.

Here's a couple of renders of a piece that's going at the top of the light stand. As you can see I used the shell command and it wasn't really necessary but as I said.. I'm having fun :D



 
Yes, having fun while learning is the most important thing.

And in this case, of course, it is best to stay all-quad, just for exercise. By the way, even while looking at the poly-count, I'd use shell. Because it would be seen otherwise.
 
Hello guys, I have a problem.

I opened my file and found that my lever was in a strange position. I have no idea how this happened but I'm clueless how to fix it.

Please watch the following video to see what I'm talking about:

Video in Youtube click here

Thanks for your help!!
 
Hi Joel.
Using Scale+Rotation variations inside hierarchies will impact these properties down the latter - you´ll get shearing+strange rotations.
If you want to get it to a normal behaviour you might need to ungroup - use Coord-System tool to reset Scale+Rotation values and stack the parts together again.

Cheers
Frank
 
Thank you Frank. So what is the right way to do this? I mean, I modeled the lever at 0,0,0, then moved and scaled to the proper place in my model, and then I put it inside the hierarchy, I'm guessing this is not the right way to do it? I have no idea when this happened unfortunately I opened the file and it was like this, so there's no undo.

I'll give it a go with the Coord System, this was the hardest part to model for me, I'm hoping I don't have to start over haha.. thanks again.
 
This will happen when Scaling is used (instead of Width/Height/Length/Radius etc) and other objects dragged to the first one:
Hierachy.gif

If you feel more comfortable with scaling instead of using Point/Edge/Polygon-modes don´t forget to reset these values with Coord-System tool to use meshes inside hierarchies. Or add a transform-modifier for instance apply the Scale/Rotation values from your base object and reset the values of the base mesh to 1:1:1 and make editable.

Cheers
Frank
 
So, per your example above, if I place it outside the hierarchy, it should turn back to normal? but it doesn't, it stays put where it is, and it already has a slight deformation.

I think the problem happened when I moved the whole model, rotated it, and moved a few parts of the top hierarchy in order to make a render, never noticed the problem and then saved and closed.
 
Here´s the Lever only - reset. But you can´t put it back into hierarchy - it will shear again due the other scalings.
joel ruiz c said:
but it doesn't, it stays put where it is, and it already has a slight deformation.
Click to expand...
Try to hold shift key down while dragging out of hierarchy. If this doesn´t help you can manually reset the scale/rotation values.

Cheers
Frank
 

Attachments

  • Lever only.jas.zip
    75.4 KB · Views: 307
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top