I would like to create a more complicated form, and I found Ray’s speeder quite cool. So I tested my abilities in Nomad - they where not as solid as I hoped, and it took me quite some time to create this model, and I’m not sure I will finish it, as the seat is causing me some headache.
But it was fun, and I found out that alphas are a quite powerful tool. In the process I discovered that Adobe Illustrator for iPad is quite useful when creating alphas. If you have access to AI you should give it a try - but I’m sure there are some powerful alternatives…
That‘s a good start. Best results in hardsurface will be achieved in modelling hardsurface like. The grill at front I.e. will look much more clean if you model it with cloned boxes. So will the net be look better if done from tubes and simple merge. Extract alpha only looks good on very high res, sometimes clone and trim are better ways. These are just some thoughts. We have seen one outstanding hardsurface model here in this forum. It must be possible.
I used the alpha map for the grill course I was lazy I guess, as it was faster than modeling it one by one. But I should remodel it. Would be nice with an array function
But I do find the use of alphas quite nice to add details.
Thing with hard surface is to brake up more complicated shapes into smaller shapes. You can get pretty far with just primitive tools. Then merging them into one. I´m working on a tutorial for hard surface in nomad. But there´s really nothing new that´s already been done in other sculpting apps. You can also make alphas in nomad if you use heightmap option in debuggin graphics section in settings. Then just taking a screenshot out of heightmap.
Sounds good about the tutorial! - your mech is really cool!
Fun thing about the depth map created in nomad - i just tried it, and it works ok - not sure what to use it for though - yet.
There is quite a lot to lurn - I’m still a bit unsure when to use the different kind of topologies. I hope you will also have something about that in your tutorial
How did you actually create the first object in your video? The one with soft edges?
I guess that the cut out is done with a copy of the object itself.
i created it by voxel remeshing. So you can make boolean operations in the scene tree. By selecting couple objects and if you make another object invisible by clicking the eye icon. That makes that object as cutter object so when you voxel remesh it subtracts that objects volume from another. And by voxelizing objects that automatically creates smooth bevels on harder edges. However this also erodes edges by making them smoother more times you voxelize them. It can be avoided by voxelizing them on higher resolution but that creates higher polycounts. So it´s a bit balacing act.
