My first real 3D model - Balisong

[Raziaar]

It's a butterfly knife. I have modeled a sharpie pen before this, but that was way too easy... so I looked around for something else, and on my desk I had an old balisong that one of my cousins gave me for my last birthday. So I chose to model this.

Since I don't know how to render or texture or anything, you'll have to just look pretty much at images of it from the modeling window rather than anything production quality finished. I really wish I knew how to texture and render properly so I can get a real nice shot and animation sequence out of it, but I am unable to do so. There is one render in this list of images, but it's really crappy and something I just threw together in 5 minutes not knowing what I was doing, so it's really really really terrible.

Anyways, here it is! The photos presented first are really crappy quality because I don't have any good lighting in this house(EDIT: Same location, just tried again to get better photos and more of them. A minor improvement, but not much), but you can rest assured the model is as accurate to the real knife as I could get it, without using reference image planes. I even managed to get the bevel of the knife blade just right. The only thing missing on the model is two screws on the belt hook, which I have chosen to omit due to frustrations with trying to get them in and look right. I also didn't create the six Torx screws, so right now they're just smooth holes. I was having difficulty making them appear properly. If I can tomorrow, I'll get more photos of the knife that aren't all blurry and terrible, and can show the bevel of the blade and stuff.

Nothing was planned, and everything was just modeled on the fly starting from a box, so this is my result... hope it's not too crappy. :cheese:

I'm also aware of how high-poly it is. Painfully aware, but I knew from the beginning going in I wasn't going to worry about polygon count and was going to model it as accurately as possible.

*Low Poly*

Vertices: 7842
Edges: 15825
Faces: 7913
Triangles: 15824

*High Poly at Subdivision level 2*

Vertices: 126530
Edges: 253200
Faces: 126600
Triangles: 253200

EDIT: Okay first I have the photos of the balisong. Still took them on my desk, but changed the settings on my camera, so it's not as sucky. Still blurry and crap though, but you can now get a much better idea of just what it looks like to compare it with my model. It's not 100% accurate, but as close I could get it without endless tweaks. After all, I've only been doing this thing by eye.

And the god awful render that I had no idea what I was doing... So it's really really really terrible. On the blade, there is a reflection that makes it seem like the bevel of the knife is weird, but that's just the reflection and as you can see in the other images it's not like that.

 

[Que-Ever]

I think it looks really good.

 

[Raziaar]

Vegeta was questioning me why I included the orthographic wire frame images, saying they were boring and just a blur of blue lines.

That may be so for some people, but for me as somebody who really appreciates 3d modeling, I really love seeing the wire frame orthographic views to get a real feel of an objects profile. I find it quite appealing to see that on 3d models, but maybe that's just me.


And thanks Que.

 

[Krynn72]

Awesome job man, turned out great!

And thats not a bad poly count at all. Looking at your wireframes, I dont really see any unnessesary geometry, and the edges are all used for a purpose, so for what you were going for, I think your polycount was not at all too much. If you were going to use that in, say a commercial for a brand of butterfly knives, that would be the normal density of something like that, so nice work. With proper materials and render settings, you could get it to look photo-real easily.

And dont listen to vegeta. Hes a nub. You always post wireframe images with your work, and if you dont, then someone will ask you to post them. Trust me.

 

[Raziaar]

Woo! Thanks toaster, and especially Krynn! It's nice to have praise. Can't believe I actually did it without quitting like I always have in the past.

I see something where I need to change, but that'll be easy... the curvature of the handles where they look a little bit too angular around the pivot point.

I've spent so many hours just minutely tweaking some of these areas like the blades edge that it doesn't phase me at all to tweak areas like that... yay.

I would really love to get it rigged so that I can animate it, since it's modeled in a way that the real one is, so it can pivot around and stuff without having geometry inside geometry. I could probably even add dynamics to it after tweaking it a tiny bit more to avoid an active dynamics mesh inside another active dynamics mesh, and just twirl it around and have it react to gravity.

Something I'll be toying around with anyways if I can.



EDIT: And thanks to you Zombie

 

[MJ12]

Good beans man Really good beans.

 

[Krynn72]

You dont really need to rig it. You can just move the pivots of the geometry to where the pivot would be (get it? ) and then you can just animate the rotation values.

 

[Raziaar]

That is actually what I had done to rotate it around to get the various shots and stuff, open and closed.

Went ahead and labeled the rotation values for open and closed that I can achieve for each of the parts, the latch, the handle with the latch on it, and the other handle. That way I can easily get it into position without any guesswork. I'm sure there's better ways to do that, but I don't know them yet.

 

[Krynn72]

You should try and find tutorials on SDKs (Set Driven Keys). Then you can just group the whole knife under one group node, then add attributes to that group node that controls the rotation of individual parts, without having to find the piece you need, and its a lot neater since you can name the attribute whatever you want (IE: you could make an attribute named "open" that controls the rotation of the handles so that when you raise that attribute, it rotates the pieces to the open position). SDKs rule.

 

[Druckles]

I thought this was your render, at first

 

[Raziaar]

ROFL. No no. Those are horribly taken photographs. Tried different places in the house and wasn't able to get anything better, so I just put it on my desk and snapped some shots, but those were the only two that managed to come out the least blurry so I threw them up as placeholders until I can find a brighter time to take better photos. I don't know how to work closeups with my digital camera.

EDIT: In the original thread up top, I added some better quality photos of the knife. Still crappy but you can get a much better representation now. Removed the two horrible ones that pretty much showed nothing.

 

[Vegeta897]

Vegeta was questioning me why I included the orthographic wire frame images, saying they were boring and just a blur of blue lines.

And I think the wire frame views are interesting to look at.

And dont listen to vegeta. Hes a nub. You always post wireframe images with your work, and if you dont, then someone will ask you to post them. Trust me.

K, thank you raziaar for making me sound like an idiot.

I said I found this image:

http://img110.imageshack.us/img110/2610/frontclosedvf4.jpg

to be kind of pointless. I can't really tell much from it. Of course the other wireframe views are good.

I never even said he shouldn't post it, for that matter. I just said it looked confusing to me.

So you all can suck my wireframe penis!

 

[Krynn72]

But I can see the locking mechanism's wireframe in there!

And you should smooth shade your penis. Nobody likes having sex with wireframes.

 

[Vegeta897]

My penis has a higher poly count than yours.

 

[Krynn72]

Its not the poly count that matters, its how you use it!

 

[kineaesth]

You hab am small penis.

Also, spy knife, amirite?

 

[Krynn72]

Also, spy knife, amirite?[/FONT]

Now Raziaar needs to model a high res, photo real Spy to go with the knife.

DO IT.

 

[Raziaar]

Now Raziaar needs to model a high res, photo real Spy to go with the knife.

DO IT.

Man, I would love to! But I'm severely lacking in my confidence of dealing with organic shapes and edge loops and stuff. I don't know the underlying musculature of the body for the most part, and this makes it really hard for me deciding how to for my edge loops, and then I run into the whole issue of triangles and quads and my paranoia of having triangles in my mesh and being unable to deal with them.

I'll get there eventually... might take me hundreds of more tutorials though which I have already viewed and read many.

EDIT: OH **** I POSTED AT 4:20.

Bed time, now.

 

[Azner]

My penis has a higher poly count than yours.

Mine is wire framed

 

[Ravioli]

GJ! pretty cool, what program did you use? There is a program called Autodesk Inventor in which you can do stuff like this in the matter of minutes with precise scale.

 

[Vegeta897]

He used Maya.

 

[Ravioli]

Ah, heard that program takes a lot of time and effort to learn, but in the end its the best program out there.

 

[Krynn72]

Its truf. Maya is win.