Hi! I am making an old school transformer in zmodeler. Any advice or techniques for making aesthetic panel lines?
Here’s an image of my approach so far. Thanks in advance!
Hello @Acydl!
It looks like you’re already off to a good start. Using the slice curve brush is a good way to do this at low poly. Be mindful, eventually you will have to clean up that topology to do much else with the mesh.
- Also consider the Panel Loops and Group Loops functions. These can be used with polygroups and partially hidden geometry in a variety of ways. Notably, this can be used to create the extrusions as separate geometry, to allow you to create these panels in a less destructive fashion to your base geometry.
This can be useful when you are trying to zremesh all the geometry into cleaner low poly hard surface geometry, for eventual fusion. When trying to get Zremesher to recognize hard edges and draw the topology appropriately, it does a better job with simpler shapes, than it does with highly complex shapes with subtle elevations.
You have many more options if willing to work at high poly:
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You can simply stamp the shapes in as an alpha with a brush, with Spotlight, or with projection master.
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Also be aware of the Spotlight Snapshot 3d function. This turns alphas into real geometry that can be positioned or scaled as desired.
While working at high poly gives you much more flexibility in shape making, the tradeoff is that , depending on your output needs, you will still need to convert it into cleaner low poly geometry–unless working for print. In that case go nuts. But the High poly to low poly conversion for hard surface meshes is a skill in its own right. It may require you to manually retopologize certain areas.
Good luck!
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Thanks very much for all these tips! I will try them out, they all seem like good ideas. I plan to 3D print these to use as about 10" tall robot toys most likely. With that said, do you think I can go the high poly sculpting route instead of the low poly Zmodeler approach? Or would I use zmodeler for the basic forms, then increase the polygon count/zremesher and use an alpha to stamp the panel lines? Thanks again.
If you’re working for print exclusively, it frees you from many of the topological concerns of people working for other workflows. Print for the most part doesn’t care about UVs, textures or topological flows.
So yes, if working for print, you could work at high poly comfortably, then simply Decimate the geometry after in order to reduce the polycount enough for your pre-print software. It would not strictly be necessary to create clean low poly topology for the purpose of texture, painting, or animation.