@Mike-Amos well, in this case i started with a basic trace of photo references, I use components, so that I can use different photos for different pieces but then the components are nested in the main assembly so they end up in the right place..

They also gave me a pretty bad photoscan, so I used that just to intersect it with a plane and extract the basic profile of the seating.
I then smoothed the extracted curve with Curvizard and normalized it with Polyline Segmentor

Then I created a base grid for the pattern with the proper real world measurements.

I then created a repeated component with Curviloft Skin

Same for the buttons

And then create a different variation of that component for the sides

And another variation for the corners

then I joined all of them together.. please notice that In this stage I try to keep the quads as even as possible, because I'm gonna deform this stuff

Then I extracted the diagonals for the sewing and used "Lines to Tubes" with quite low poly geometry.. and of course I did some cleanup with quadface tools for the overlapping geometry which will not be seen.

I then created the base shape of the seating using Curviloft ad Quadface tools.. and extracted the grid were I need the upolstered thing..

Then I use the QuadfaceTools "Unwrap Grid" feature to extract a flat grid from that.. which has the exact same lenght and topology of the seating that I'm going to replace.. and here is the flowify rig setup that I used to send the geometry to the curved surface.

WARNING: you need to use "flowify without cuts" to avoid messy topolgy and keep quads.

From this stage, it was just a matter of stitching and tweaking.. with the usual VertexTools, QFT, Artisan shenanigans

Meanwhile I also added the studs.. I used profile builder assembly to place them and then manually repositioned some bits in the problematic areas

And this is the updated version with the studs..
I hope this was helpful to better understand the process..

It's a bit different every time.. the shoe and the skatepark used a quite different process.. and the other sofas I posted before of that, is another different story..

Trick or treat

Bowl du Prado.

The infamous Marseille Skatepark.

I''ll do some minor tweaks and a bit of housekeeping (organizing layers, purging, renaming, setting scenes and styles and whatnot)
Then I'll share this model (including the lowpoly cage, the pbr maps and a 3d printable version) for you guys to take a closer look at this workflow.
I will probably do a separate post with the download link and a bunch of screenshots to explain the main steps of this workflow.

I had to put the shoe modeling on hold because I had to do this for work today

@gabino yes I did a few test of animated objects in Unreal, but for real production I've used it only for archviz flytrough, because it has good visual quality and reasonable render time.
I managed to make it work with animated objects coming from 3dsMax both using animated/skinned fbx and alembic cached animations (mainly for particle systems, animated splines/booleans and this kind of stuff).

In real production, for animated objects I tend to prefer Unity 3d over Unreal.
I find Unity timeline interface more straightforfard compared to Unreal sequencer.
I find it easier also to keyframe objects in Unity itself (alongside with the usal imported fbx and alembic animations).
I'm not into "proper" character rigging, but I do sometimes use animated entourage people from 3dsMax "Populate" crowd system and also some Mixamo take for more specific characters with some particular animation.
I import those as skinned fbx files (with skeletons)

I also did some conveyor belts animation, one of which you can see in this video.
This was made with 3dsMax particle systems and controllers to be used in Unity, but it could absolutely be imported in UE5 with no problems at all.

Animated conveyor belts.mp4

In this post I shared a video of animated objects rendered in Unity 3d
All of this objects could be imported and used in UE.. except I find it more cumbersome and just prefer to use Unity for this kind of stuff and Unreal just for camera animations.
But probably it's just a matter of taste and habits..
You could do pretty much the same in UE.

Another free one you could look into is the "radial bend" feature from Fredoscale. The plugin also includes other really useful features such as tapering, stretching, twisting and so on..

A few models I made recently for a manufacturer that makes custom sofas to fit on yachts.

Another bunch of screenshots from the same series..
All modeled using QFT, VT2, SUbD and a bit of Curviloft, JPP and Artisan mixed in the process.
The UV mapping was done in Wrapr..

@Rich-O-Brien said in SubD examples and models:

Yummy, I'd try to resolve this area to be more uniform

Yeah definetly, I was still fiddling around with loops, but I already did yesterday after posting those screenshots, because that 3 to 1 was causing a noticeable bump after subdividing.
I also modeled the inside of the shoe, started to reshape the sole better, figured out a bit about the lace pattern and started to add tickness to the various layers of the main body.

@Rich-O-Brien said in SubD examples and models:

Does Topogun allow you to do quad patches?

It does and they are interactive, you can preview them and dynamically change the number of segments for each curve and change how the topology is arranged. You can create multiple patches at once, with 2,3,4 or more splines, join them and so on and so forth.
Once created you can't change them anymore, but you can edit them with the usual topology tools like move, extrude, draw, cut, collapse, brushes for soft move and relax and the usual stuff.

2025-05-16 14-02-28.mp4

@Rich-O-Brien yeah, in Sketchup is hard to imagine this kind of stuff working in realtime.

For simple objects sometime I do some basic retopology using Tools on Surface, or Artisan Knife or Intersecting geometry, then extract the edges, weld and run QFT "create quadfaces from wireframes".
Another workaround is to pre-triangurate (with qft diagonals) small patches and then use the "Drop To" plugin to trow/conform them over objects.
I usually do those tricks for smaller portions of models.

For massive retopology on heavy meshes like this (this model is 120k+ vertices) I usually run Topogun (whith QFT oj import/export) then import back the base topology to refine and detail it using VT, Artisan, Edge tools, Qft, fredo corner, JPP, Flowify and basically every plugin compatible with quads (and basically whatever tool and plugin as long as I use the pretriangulation trick).

I did a quick video to demonstrate this tecnique a few time ago..

@Rich-O-Brien said in Ferrari F2004:

The GOAT

Indeed.

@EricBreuerDesigns said in Toposhaper:

I am having difficulty finding

Use the link provided by Rich and just hit download

@Rich-O-Brien said in Ferrari F2004:

Love the heat haze!

It's actually pretty simple and nearly physically based.
After quite a lot of overcomplicated experiments, I came up with something really simple and actually pretty effective that renders super-fast and works at every viewing angle with zero postproduction needed.

This is the final version.
I made a smooth lowpoly volume for the wawe and linked it to the main car rig (which is actually animated in order to get physically accurate motion blur and panning effect).

The base material is just "clean air"

• no diffuse/albedo
• no specular reflection
• no normal/bump/displacement whatsoever
• fully refractive
• base IOR = 1

You'd say: "Nice, a useless material which basically does nothing applyed to a useless mesh which is basically invisible".

But then there's the crucial trick.

• I plugged a map in the IOR slot of the material with a multiplier of 3.
  Basically the map acts as a mask telling Vray: "When the pixel is full white display IOR 3 (heavy distortion), when the pixel in the mask is full black, fallback to the base material IOR (which, as we said, is 1 so 0 distortion), if it's some grey interpolate accordingly between the two"
• the map itself is a composite map (blended in overlay mode to keep the dark part and the light part, while applying a bit of contrast)
• the main turbulence effect blended in the composite IOR map is some kinda procedural fractal/turbulence noise (greyscale)
• the second map blended in is another procedural map with some "custom inverted fresnel law". Basically a view-based fall-off driven by a linear curve graph which interpolates between white when camera rays are perpendicular to the suface of the wawe mesh, while gradually fades toward black when camera rays hit the mesh at increasing angle. This actually gives the smooth transition at the edge of the wawe object at any viewing angle (without it, the thing would look as a slab of unreflective frosted glass or something like that)

@Rich-O-Brien said in Ferrari F2004:

Flashback to Schuey giving Barichello the win at Indianapolis

Actually that one was two years before, but yeah, definitely that render was meant as a tribute to that legendary shot... of course you nailed it, as opposed to an architect on the Italian SketchUp community who said, when I originally shared the renderings: "Nice, but you absolutely need to remove that brick material thing which is ugly, out of context, doesn't make sense and completely ruins the shot"

@pixelcruncher said in Ferrari F2004:

Nice! What tool did you use to create these renders?

Vray GPU 4.3.1 (in 3dsMax).
Max was used also to model the water puddle and the water droplets in the 1st image (about 3.5 millions vertices) and the heatwawe volume (really lowpoly just to hold the refractive material) in the 5ft and 6th image.
Everything else was done in Sketchup.

said in Ferrari F2004:

I posted some still renders at this link.

Unfortunately my Facebook profile is down due to a false positive for "Advertisement Cybersecurity" (never did a single "Ad" in my life, but.. yeah).

While I wait to see if eventually their stupid AI bot their "assistance team" will restore it, I'll repost the original renders here.

@utiler said in VRay won't recognize studio license:

I did log in to Trimble Connect andclieck My Products which is where I downloaded the VRay file to load which I have done

Silly question (but this is an error that I myself actually did in the past, so..)
After that, did you make sure that in Chaos login you used the "login with Trimble" option and not the "Login with Google" or something like that?

@ntxdave if you don't need the full pro Photoshop experience, but you want a free clone (which allows you to follow along most basic Photoshop tutorials) you can also give a try to https://www.photopea.com/

It will work in your browser (kinda like SketchUp free does) and doesn't need an account.
You can also install it locally if you prefer.

Well, you said that:

@L-i-am said in Thinking of our Majid today:

I think that anyone who does not see that Europe is being invaded by a group that has no chance of integration is misguided and irrational

And I have to disagree. The official numbers are those I reported and believe me the reasons for the rage against government you are talking about raise from the problems which I listed, rather than the "invasion".

@L-i-am said in Thinking of our Majid today:

Italians have a history of dissatisfaction with Government

This is absolutely true but again: this has nothing to do with some imaginary "invasion".
It's mostly related to a few real problems.

My perception, based not on graffiti or a certain type of foreign press, but on the fact that I was born and lived here all my life, is that the top ten reasons are the following (aside from the ones I mentioned, which are indirectly the cause of most of the others):

• corrupt politicians
• mafia
• half the population pays extremely high taxes because the other half evades them
• half the population retired under the old laws under 40, and the other half will have to work until they're over 70 under the new laws to pay the pensions of those others
• non-existent industrial policies and avalanches of public money given away to companies like Fiat and Alitalia, who ate it up and then went abroad
• high unemployment and low wages
• high inflation and constantly rising prices
• if you book a medical appointment at a public facility, the first available date is in 6 months (or in more than a year for particularly specialized visits)
• uncontrolled car traffic, poor public transportation, and Unreliable and potholed roads, delayed trains.
• Poor management of public waste collection

@Mike-Amos said in Thinking of our Majid today:

In this case Greece and parts of Italy.

I live in that part of Italy and I have to partly disagree.
Regardless the storytelling about that, by no means that's the main problem we have to face.
To be fair, we have 1 illegal immigrant for every 100 people, we have 15 people who are basically fascists for every 100 people, we have 36 functional illiterates for every 100 people, not to mention that we have 100 members of parliament with some kind of criminal record out of 600.