Help modeling a specific shape.

Hello everyone.

I am a novice blender user. I can achieve pretty much anything I want and know my way around pretty darn well; however, there is one type of shape class I come upon now and again that I have great difficulty modeling well. It is generally some type of solid with one or more cutouts or concave sections. It is exemplified by the shape I show below:


I am just a hobbyist and have no formal training or anything, and unfortunately I am having trouble finding examples of modeling something like this so I have two questions:
-A: What would a professionally modeled version of this mesh look like.
-B: What tools would you use to accomplish this?

If I can get one example I am sure I can extrapolate to anything else I might need. I am sure this is a simple question but I am still pretty newb.

Pointers to any helpful tutorials addressing this kind of problem would be helpful too.

Also, I wasn’t really sure how to really title this thread, and consequently didn’t really know what to search for to get answers to this question… in case there are other posts asking similar :slight_smile:

TIA

http://www.rab3d.com/tut_blen_precision_guide.php

Depends on the requirements, starting from its end use. If it has to be a mesh and it’s just the shape extruded with flat faces, could use whatever fills to make the shape, as long there aren’t any concave polygons.

Although, that kind of shape is easiest to make with curves. Gives a nice way to trace it and controls to get the extrusion and resolution.

Or if it has to be suitable for subdivision


Targeting subdivision level 2,
(orange): marking hard corners
(red): marking approximation for curves with appropriate density
(green): marking support loops
(blue): and fills that continue face loops so that the support loops can be added later


And the resulting mesh

  • structure without subdivision
  • with
  • and result at subdivision level 2

Thank you both. That PDF Richard linked is one of the most useful and interesting guides I’ve ever read and I am really enjoying it.

JA12 Curves is what I’ve been using, but I’ve not been able to get results like yours. Are you using bezier curves in conjunction with bsurfaces, or nurbs surface curve constructs?

And the mesh will need to be rendered with a PBR shader, so are the triangles that this will generate adequate for such a shader or should the quads be more uniform? IE would you be comfortable handing that in as a professional work?

Sure appreciate your reply. Thank you both.

Hi,

I prefer to do shapes like that in a vector drawing program like Illustrator, Inkscape (free) or in my case Affinity Designer (Mac)
Then export/import it as a .svg
Do material and extrude in Blender.

Cheers



Thanks for the answers. Very helpful. I get so caught up in modeling my surfaces/patches I forget the simple things sometimes, like a simple bezier extrusion. I was trying to generate an efficent good looking surfce with nurbs… that was hard. :slight_smile: Thanks for showing what a good cleaned up mesh for this would look like. I was concerned about the high density vertices around the lower notch, but I guess you are right, since the surface is flat in this case, it shouldn’t matter, and I would rather have a cleaner, easier to uv map mesh.

@Jakerlund Thanks for the neat tip. I use inkscape all the time for other things and just never thought of doing this.

WOw super thanks for this, hope this will help me be a better modeller

For those pieces, you can just make a shape fill with bezier curves because for one thing, they’re higher resolution than a mesh and are much easier to handle than nurbs (because you can tweak handles and change their type to ‘vector’ for sharp corners).

If you need to do mesh-specific operations later, you can convert them to a mesh.