Cerbera

Can't tell exactly how many nubbins there are on the base there, but if I guess 8, then we can set the segments on our initial geo to a multiple of that number, so here 16. I started with a disc, added a single loop cut where I wanted the nubs to stop, and then selected pairs of segments to extrude (no caps) or ctrl-drag an arbitrary amount to get the bumps... We can't do all them in one go if they are next to each other, so I did them 4 at a time. And then it's over to SDS to do the rest of the work for you... I quadded the centre to avoid a nasty SDS pinch there (close poly hole / patch mode). Without seeing the bottom view of the bottle, and without any similar ones lying about at home for refs, I don't really know how the bumps fade out towards the centre, but we can easily adjust that by moving the inner circle of extruded points, or we can add one more loop cut half way between edge and centre to better define that transition. You don't want to add more than 1 loop though, as then shapes will start to become too defined under SDS. The little grip bits in the cap are such relatively tiny details, nobody is going to notice if you do it in texturing, but TBH it is quicker still to just model them separately and slightly intersect them with the main model, and we certainly don't want the rest of the mesh at the sort of resolutions that the grip section would require if it were part of it ! So if you want to do that just start with a tall cube in a radial cloner, add enough Y segments to it so they SDS with the correct amount of roundness, and then set the radius in the cloner and adjust the amount and size until it looks right. It's hard to see from the pic, but it looks to me like the plastic wrap stops before the ridged bit, so we shouldn't need to worry about that ? But no matter if we do. To get the plastic wrap layer we can directly split the wrap polys from the base mesh, and then just manually adjust a few loops so it gets round the bumps OK and add parametric thickness with Thicken generator or manually via a tiny 'caps on' extrude. CBR

I feel for them - Blender's modelling, whilst not terrible by a long shot, is a waaay short of the sort of powers Modo had...

I too mourn its passing. Although I never quite committed to using it as my main 3D tool there was a lot about it I liked (and more so than either Max or Maya) and I used to often check their progress and new features and was consistently impressed by their very expansive modelling toolset, particularly their unusual boolean / SDS workflow. And of course it upsets me on a wider level to think that another one-time giant of the modelling world isn't there any more and didn't think it was worth pursuing as a focus. My focus remains very much ' the modelling', and I still it enjoy that more than I do any other aspect of 3D. Fortunately Cinema has come on in leaps and bounds in that department in the last 5 years, and continues to get more comprehensive to the point where it can rival Modo's former glories and go beyond them with multi-threaded power... CBR

There is no limit to how many booles you can have in a scene, or how many you can nest, although the law of diminishing returns applies particularly steeply in that last regard. Yes, it's quite an old Boolean system with some limitations. there are things you can do to try and subvert it into working though. Sometimes moving operands tiny distances, or changing segmentation can bring back vanishing meshes and circumvent artefacts. But for every boole you nest things become orders of magnitude more likely to conflict and cause surface artefacts. Try and use connects and keep topology roughly even size across all operands. For static shots there is usually a way to make most setups work somehow with some combination of the techniques above. CBR

Are each of those knots set to 'step' mode, or just the first one ? CBR

No, Surface deformer will be very awkward to control. I would try polygon pen / poly snap onto the surface of a sphere to create a flat version of the shapes, starting at the centre with the triangle bits and working back from there. Make sure those have enough polys to adequately deform around the sphere. You could make 1 of those and then try place tool to get rotatable copies. When I have all of the shapes in place flat I might get a spherize deformer involved to make sure they are circular, and then it's just a case of adding thickness after that (Extrude should do it), and then making the points, where of course the thickness goes down to a point, which is why we can't do it parametrically via thickness generator etc. CBR

Pfff - don't know about that dude. I'd say we hold the modelling fort with similar, if not identical levels of veracity and diligence ! 😉

Nice, and exactly what I woulda done 🙂 CBR

Me too, but I'm off for a weekend ride now, so we can compare and contrast notes later ! 🙂 There doesn't seem to be much in the way of tension wrinkles, so we probably don't need to break out the shrinking balloon cloth sim stuff I'd guess, though might be fun to give it a go... CBR

I have never used the plugin so can't compare what we have to it, but this is the recently added Normal Editor we now have within Cinema (2024+). Not sure if that can do what you need, but that's what it looks like, and is accessible from the mesh menu or via commander. CBR

You're not wrong - there's a lot of additional inside detail that made me at least double my initial 'outside only' estimate ! CBR

I suggest you show the inside as well, as you would like that included in the model, and it will affect quotes you get as it did mine ! CBR

I think there's a good 4 hours work in modelling that from scratch, but that won't be anything like as expensive as giving you step by steps, which actually takes way way longer than me just modelling it myself. I'll PM you about this later, but just to have run out on a mission now... CBR

Applause from the gallery 🙂 CBR

Not really ! The whole OM is rather built around the principle of dragging things about with a mouse, which although in most cases is its best feature is also its biggest curse for these vast unorganised scenes we tend to get. All good tips so far. We should also mention the ability to open more than 1 OM at once so that one can always be scrolled to the top, making dragging things from the other involve less upward scrolling, and also the use of modifier keys when expanding or opening multi-level folders / nulls to speed up readability. My approach to these things is much like EAlexander's above, I try and use rectangle select in the vp to grab groups of things that seem to belong together, Alt-G them, name and hide the group, then rinse and repeat until there is nothing left in the vp. CBR

Some questions... 1. Do you feel that the FBX won't render correctly for some reason ? The surfacing looks generally pretty good to me ! 2. Are you looking for help modelling it yourself, or would you rather just pay someone to model it for you ? Only, the latter will be very much faster if speed is key. 3. If you choose the 'help me do it' approach, are you looking for step by step detailed instructions on every part, or just a general talk-through and game plan for the model, discussing techniques we might employ for the trickier areas ? None of this is particularly difficult to model, but it is fairly time-consuming and precision work, especially if there are reasons we need to rebuild it from scratch and if we have to model the inside surfaces as well. I can help in all regards - either modelling it for you, skyping you through the general approach, or the actual modelling of it live with commentary, if you think that would help more. I do have some time today and tomorrow if you need to get this done, but I'm afraid it would be at my normal hourly rate. CBR

I'd like to think it should be 🙂 But, being as it is, very very old, the metaball object doesn't have a way to read the colours of objects inside it or to blend between them like it does with the geo. So I think we'd have to do it with fields colour somehow, which is not my area of expertise, so best left to people with more knowledge than me in that area to answer. CBR

We won't know until we get a scene file ! 😉 CBR

Yep, 2 or many more ! Categories for each software got simplified at the same time we expanded to encompass other ones than C4D. CBR

Are you open to ways not involving fields ? At first glance I reckon Xpresso might be the best answer here - could we not link the height of the object to a ramp controlling the colour of a material assigned to just that top polygon ? I may try that later if I get time, but not being any great shakes in the XP department might struggle with translating things between the right colours ! What colour do we want it to start and end btw ? CBR

If it's completely black, then yes, I don't see any reason why you can't just leave it out and set metalness to 0 in the base properties. They probably provide it anyway just for consistency / standards reasons, OR if you look really closely, some might not be entirely black, and there is some intended variation going on in that channel, which is rare, but not unheard of. I do note, however, that color picking from that black area of thumbnail above reports the color as being uniform, but not quite RGB 0,0,0 according the HSV values ! CBR

I wish that was the way it worked ! Good old Skeletor - reminds me of the classic twitter account... CBR

I can't see that dude - I'm 51 !! CBR

I think my browser must be broken - it's not showing me the wires 😉 CBR

That's quite a long-winded thing to explain ! Fortunately, XP TV have done it already. You might also find Noseman's recent series of mechanical rigging sessions on the Maxon training channel helpful. CBR