video - Hot Air Balloon

[rickei]

Hi guys,

I'm not sure you can call this a tutorial, more like a modeling session.
I was trying out a new screen capture app, and I needed to model a cartoon balloon for a friend, so here it is... it's about 30 min's...(36mb .mov file no sound)
Balloon Modeling.mov
it shows very basic edge modeling, and setting up very basic shading domains.

maybe someone can get something out of it.

[sadot]

Cool !


Hmm In Hex Where is the option to view the active tool, I see some tuts showing that as a floating window

[rickei]

I don't know abut the active tool window??? I would use it though.

I tried not to use any key-commands while doing this so people could see what tools i was using.

[Couerl]

I think show tool is in preferences, but I don't really use it.

Nice balloon! It's good to do these kinds of things and this is how I learned Hex-1, just by watching the Steph3D and Thomas videos over and over again and copy-catting them. If a picture says a thousand words, a movie says a million and you can learn tricks and workflows by watching them faster than any book can teach you. You not only get to show others a way to do something, but you can also get a lot out of it yourself. Looking at the workflow I'm sure you noticed some things yourself. You might try to leverage ring and 1n more to avoid all that manual selecting on edges and points. Also something I learned is that extracting edges like in the case of the top of the balloon and then modeling the new geometry directly in place helps you to avoid alignment issues later. This is particularly true when you want to animate things like wheels turning or propellers and stuff and if it is aligned exactly to begin with then later you won't have any headaches or tweaking to do.

Great stuff Rickei, I hope more people do this kind of thing!

Steven

[rickei]

Thanks,

If/when I do another one of these. I will probably model one first and then go back and do another one for the video. You can notice, several times where I kinda fumble around trying to decide how i will handle the next procedure. I was just making it up as I went along.

I'll bet I could model an other balloon in about 5 min now, so i learned a lot myself. oh and I did find that tool window under preferences..."display command viewer" so thats something else I learned!

[Couerl]

Heh, the "fumbling" part can be just as instructive as the easier, more fluid parts, it just illustrates all the different ways you can think about something and how to build it and doesn't reflect so much on a skill level or anything. I noticed those things and identified with them and that's the only reason I made comments. If you polish something up too much then it just becomes showing off and loses some of the genuineness of it I think.

If anything, I'd say add a little music to the next one, it's always nice to have a little hard rock or metal to listen to when you're modeling. Oh, by the way you never mentioned what capture soft you were trying out, I still just use erm,... Wink-2 and it does the job, but it's mem intensive and I need to stop at least every 5 minutes at 6fps or my system bogs down.

Keep em coming, I haven't posted anything lately because I'm doing other stuff, but I'm watching to be sure and look forward to getting back in the game myself soon.

Steven

[rickei]

for video capture I'm using iShowU. it's Mac only though. It will go on for hours, with no real slowdown. I accidentally left it running, and didn't even notice until about 3 hrs later.

I've noticed you've been scarce lately. I check out these forums daily, but don't have much time, to actually do anything 3D either. I'm planning out a big scene, to work on over the winter months. hopefully you'll be around more to give me some pointers.

[LoneGunman]

Nice video rickei, that is exactly how I model almost anything in Silo, just using few tools