Cerbera

Oh, thank goodness you'll find it now - that is a very helpful thing ! Middle toolbar, cog wheel next to magnet (snap). Those double arrows let you auto-select any type of the flagged components, so you can easily find, select and remove isolated points for example. The only downside of this, and the reason you probably wouldn't leave it on all the time whilst modelling, is that it can make your edge selections less clear if they are overlaid with (say) the green border markers for example... CBR

I believe the way that is meant to work is that if you CO&D meshes that have identically named tags those will be merged. Non-identical ones should get preserved instead. And indeed that is what is happening for me. We can also fix wrong ones later using modifier keys and the commands in the tag to update the selections to what they should be. But we do need scripts to automate this process currently. CBR

Righty - here's how I'd go about modelling that base... We have 12 way rotational symmetry, and within that 2 way planar symmetry, meaning we only have to design topology for a nice small manageable section. And we don't need to go to the centre with that, because that is on a dual axis curve so we don't want any poles there. We'll make a patch for that later. 1. I started by outlining the main nubbin with as few polys as I thought I could get away with (whilst still keeping them mainly even)... I am using HB retopo for this, but if you find yourself without that, then polygon snap will do just fine in a pinch, and you could even shrink wrap onto the CAD model to more rigidly stick to that surface as you work)... I am working with symmetry here, so have only modelled the right side... you can optionally use the symmetry Hub / mode, but for technical reasons, I didn't on this occasion ! 2. Next, let's patch that any old how, expecting to need to revise it later, and expand the upper border... mostly using poly pen here, and frequently utilising things like smooth edges and equal spacing to keep things neat... 3. We need to continue out to half way across the square block bits, so did that, trying to keep edges as even as possible. 4. But now my modelling spidey senses kick in to suggest we'll be needing some harder edges and corners on the inner edge of the square bits, and that we should continue the lower loop around the indent on, to keep its outer control loop flowing around it (rather than down towards the centre), which led to the following topology changes... So I've run an extra loop across the square bit, and slid some edges about to get tight control loops for those corners, but, crucially, have got 4 evenly spaced edges at both inner and outer borders, which is vital for perfect SDS circularity (top) and partial sphericity (inner). I actually went on a bit beyond this to tighten those corners further before the next stage, and added some consistency as to how I did the cornering and additional loops round bevels for better base mesh definition. 5. So, having got one segment of the 12 mostly right, we can radial clone that x 12 to get the complete outer ring for the base. That'll need to be in a connect (weld on) to join those together. Having done that, we can make that connect editable, and count our border edges, which in my case was 48, which we can divide by 4 to conclude that we need a 12 x 12 plane for that centre section, and we will need to make that editable, Fit Circle it, relax / iron the inner points, project it to the CAD model (shrink wrap deformer) so we match the curve exactly and then CO&D that to the connect we made earlier, which should match perfectly if plans have gone well thus far... This means we don't have any complex poles in the base on that subtle curved area at the centre, which is important, because even though the slope is quite gentle there, it curves in 2 directions at once, so triangles or pole counts more than 4 will produce SDS artefacts that will be variously noticeable and not fixed by adding more SDS levels. SDS L3 is perfectly sufficient for this unless we choose to use SDS edge weighting (not necessary here), which would necessitate an extra level of it. ...and that leaves us a very manageable 48 radial polys with which to work our way up the rest of the bottle... We conclude that section with an Optimize, and checking it with Mesh Checker to hopefully reveal all quads and no borders, isolated points, or other errors ! 🙂 Hope that helps CBR

Aha ! If we have the CAD, then things become a lot clearer / more accurate, and indeed I can now see that the bottom of this bottle is not very much like the coke-style one I guessed it might be originally ! 🙂 The principals I highlighted above though still hold true, in that we should still start at the bottom and work our way up. So this is the ref for our base... So, if we want to throw this at ZRM (usually a good idea, just to see, and sometimes we can be pleasantly surprised by how good the result is !) we should rotate the model first from its default position so that the Symmetry options in ZRM can usefully apply, thus increasing our chances of getting mesh consistency across the model... And as we can see, we can get a really pretty reasonable easy quick result, that would be sufficient for getting fairly close to the object with the camera if we do that... But perfection it is not, and if you are one of the few remaining artists for whom modelling nicely is a pleasure in and of itself AS WELL as getting us to a much more perfect result, then I would say it is worth the effort of doing it properly with SDS modelling. The downside of re-mesher is that its polygon efficiency is arbitrary / based on user-input number / percentage, it can't detect flow very well automatically (see those indents at the off-axis angles) and we that need quite high numbers of polys in the base mesh to accurately gain those shapes, which is quite inefficient and nearly always leads to it using way more polys than it should have to. However, even if we do intend to model this 'properly', we can gain a good understanding of the sort of polygon density that should be possible, and get ideas for the flow of certain (on-axis) features that might not have occurred to us initially, so it's all good XP... I have some spare time later today, so will pop back then with a new plan for that base, hopefully demonstrating the optimum topology there. CBR

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