Leaderboard

Thanks for all the feedback and examples. I reworked the mesh this morning before seeing your insomnia post and thought I'd share what I did to show the poly flow and leading edge. I'm not sure if I did the best job in removing the complex poles on the leading edge or not. I did so by adding a column of polys around the wing. I noticed you didn't do that, but I couldn't see if you removed those poles on the leading edge or not. I'll continue work on the exhaust. Your solution is what I was going for. I had done something similar for the orange and green lines, but got really messy with the interior because I didn't plan out the first part well. Thanks again for the breakdown.

I had insomnia in the night, so continued a bit with this, and then actually left your intended design slightly (!) with the aim of showing you some more optimum edge flows etc etc... so below I have 'completed' the rear vent in just one of the myriad ways in which we could do that... that looks like this... And breaking that down into stage, in case it helps you with yours... Referring to following... 1. Beginning with the opening I made yesterday, first step is to ctrl-scale in a small loop to redirect the edge flow around that hole (yellow arrows) 2. Then I added some edge loops along the 'spike' to get more density there, and bridged from one side of the hole to the other (green lines) 3. Then I added those 3 loops (purple lines) with loop cut and moved those into an inverse curvy shape matching the outer side roughly... 4... which gave me 8 edges (red highlighted) I could then extrude back into the hull, and rotate the round the corner. Lastly I did a round of tweaking in which I evened out and prettified all the edges etc etc, and then patched the end to quads with the 14 edges I had there. Now I don't know if that is exactly the sort of vent you want there, but I figured it might be useful to you to see that approach regardless. CBR

It is amazing how VFX houses that specialize in digital environments are doing amazing work but are largely unknown. They are not big names because their work essentially goes unnoticed. They are not creating the big "wow" moments that audiences remember walking out of the theater. They are not creating the "money shots". But because they fool us so well, their talents and skills are just as amazing as what comes out of the big-name FX houses (IMHO). Recently, I came to find out that there is one such VFX house near me in Boston, MA called Zero VFX. While they do more than digital environments, see their reel here), digital environments are probably the best place to find their work in main-stream movies. Now, what is really interesting is how I came to find out that they even existed at all (remember, their work is hidden after all). It turns out that one of their VFX supervisor's children is in my wife's math class at a local high school. She found out during a parent-teacher conference. He has an impressive lineage too having worked at Tippet Studios and Blue Sky before coming to Zero VFX. I immediately petitioned for that student to get an automatic "A" in her class but was voted down. 🤨 Dave