Reply To: Collab2021 – WIP – navik

Thank you both @blanchsb and @theluthier for your kind words 🙂

I’ve just had a surge of motivation (coupled with insomnia, perfect combination :D) and spent some hours on the modelling re-work.

So, here’s what I did:

I only did pairs of beams instead of sets of three as I felt it was a whole lot already. For the roof tiles, I used a total of 8, but 5 of which are actually all the same, so that the majority of the tiles made by the Point Instance geometry node are “good” tiles. The 3 others are there for a bit of variety with small breaks in them.

There were 2 things that took me a lot, lot longer than what it should have been. :

– First, I had setup a BASE_MESHES collection, separated from the rest, which contains the meshes from which I’d duplicate everything else.  After I had modeled all those, I wondered why the actual roof’s meshes were not similar. As if the bevel modifier I was using was not applied to all the duplicates. That’s when I made the mistake of launching myself into manually beveling each of the base meshes, thinking “ah well I should have applied the modifier before link-duplicating them”. 

– Second, I was not experienced with “manually” beveling meshes. I don’t know what happened in my head but I figured “hey the modifier’s probably applying a bevel on everything, right ?”. So, that’s what I did. Selected all faces, beveled everything. “Doesn’t look so bad” I thought. After I did the same for every model, and only then, I realized… the shading was off, because beveling everything meant double edges everywhere. I checked back Andy’s wip post, and saw that I had indeed far, far too many vertices in some places. So I went back and fixed (or at least tried I’d say) all the meshes, reducing the number of segments in each one of them. Based on what was said during last week’s stream, I left triangles when there were some. I did remove any n-gons though.

And so, here’s a screenshot of all the base meshes. Yes, it’s completely inspired by Andy’s WIP post 🙂

Things I learned:

• Linked duplicates
• Basic Geometry nodes
• Beveling tool and why Beveling everything is not good and I should have instead carefully selected the edges I wanted to bevel
• GOOGLE THINGS BEFORE TRYING TO FIX THINGS. If I did a bit of research before throwing myself head first into this I would have known about the Shift-L and Ctrl-L shortcuts. But hey that’s what happens when you don’t sleep, I guess.

Anyway. With all that I think next time I work on this I’ll start the sculpting 🙂 I made a WIP_house_roof_navik_02.blend file with the updated meshes and also a better organisation. Later !