Reply To: Sharpie’s Polybook

[Collin Jensen]

Hard Drive Part 2

I have just finished the video and the primary takeaway I have (which matches what @thehomme pointed out) is that I shouldn’t have forgotten about weighted bevels! The bevel modifier is a new one for my toolkit, so I really only used it for the tiny bevels along the edges. The video uses a shader bevel instead, which isn’t a problem. I’m hesitant to use the shader bevel because it seems like it could get complicated when you start to bake normals. By that I mean, when we do a high-poly to low-poly bake, I imagine the shader bevel would have to bevel certain parts of the normal differently in a way similar to weighted beveling for the bevel modifier, rather than applying a uniform bevel across the hole piece. I also could be very wrong, since I haven’t done a whole lot of normal baking.

The freedom given by the bevel modifier and other non-destructive workflows like it, is that we can freely modify them at any point in the future. The video does this, and at one point I had to manually modify a bevel I manually created in this project. Ew!

There are some details of the hard drive I got wrong simply because I stopped watching it when he said “You should go try this yourself first.” Things like the real world scale of the hard drive, the fact that the bottom of the main case is beveled, and the fact that there are 6 total tiny rubber feet on the bottom, while mine only has 4. Also, I didn’t realize from the screenshot that the little light bar below the letter sticks out. These are nit-picks akin to the video perfecting that bevel on the front panel to match the case, so I’m not worried about them at all.

So yes, as Martin and Omar have pointed out, the end result of my work works so the ways my methods differ isn’t necessarily incorrect. However, I really like the elegance and simplicity of the method used in the video, primarily because he used weighted bevels to curve things. He also didn’t use a subdivision surface modifier, so his final mesh is likely less dense than mine, and triangle counts do matter in some applications. I’ll have to give the weighted bevels another visit, since I used exactly zero of them in mine!

Thanks for all of your feedback! Since this project was created before I watched the video. I think I’m going to move on the subdivision surface modifier section instead of creating a second project akin to the Hard Drive. I anticipate using bevel modifiers a lot in that part of the course!