@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

A couple of spherical topology experiments

Full-Quad-Full-Triangle-Full-Sphere.skp

Corrugated_Sphere.skp

@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.

This is insanely great!

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..

@AISmebel said:

I would like to ask you to share this interesting plugin. I created a lot of interesting things myself with the help of Claude. It's interesting to see what others are doing.

It's currently in the last (I hope so) alpha stage, I'll need to fix a couple of edge cases before it can go beta.

@fredo6 said:

I also want to suggest that after using the plug-in, the components do not deform, bend in shape and retain their component properties

I don't understand what you mean.

Wow, I realize that I didn't understand correctly the proposal, so I retreat my + 20 on this.
Because you basically can't do that in Sketchup (you'd need some sort of modifier system similar to the 3dsMax one to accomplish this).
I understood that he was talking about a non-slicing behavior instead (which would be preferable).

@fredo6 said:

I am not sure it is possible to identfy and carry over the quad mesh, because of the slicing.

I guess it's super-difficult when you need to slice (so you are creating new geometry with new vertex-order/face-IDs), but it's actually quite easy when you just need to deform.
The key is that you apply preemptive triangulation (with different properties for planar quads/planar n-gons) at the very beginning of the deforming operation in order to stabilize vertex order, edge properties and UV mapping, then you can safely preserve/restore everything once the deformation is done.

I'm not a programmer, but I managed to formalize the whole algorithm decently enough that Claude can execute that brilliantly (based on the steps that I use to do manually in order to stabilize a mesh for proper Subdivision/Uv-mapping workflow).

I achieved good deformations which are reliably preserving quads, and UV mapping with decent fallback methods for n-gons.
I was planning to share the code with you regardless (for review before publishing it on Sketchucation), I think it could be interesting if you could integrate (and probably improve) it in some of your plugins, this one could be a clear candidate.

@AISmebel said:

the triangulating line that appears after using the plugin should become soft+smooth

Nope.
It should be soft = true; smooth = true AND cast shadows = false otherwise it will not work.

@AISmebel said:

I also want to suggest that after using the plug-in, the components do not deform, bend in shape and retain their component properties

I agree +20 on this!
I already said that in the original discussion on Trimble forum and I 100% stand on that.
Slicing should be optional. The default behavior should be "deform only", that would make more sense.

Amazing. Does it support quads and/or UV preservation?

This is nice, but definitely has nothing to do with LUTs. LUTs are about color, not grain.

@Gus-R said:

"what's wrong with movies today" video on Youtube

Do you have a link for it? Sounds like something quite interesting to watch..

@Arkanthiell said:

what exactly you did

I did exactly this and it worked perfectly.

Give_A_Proper_Name_To_Your_Files.skp

@Arkanthiell SketchUp is a polygon modeler not a "solid/nurbs" cad modeler such as Solid Works or Inventor.

In whatever polygon modeler (including the most powerful ones, such as 3dsMax or Blender) ngons are a well-known source of problems, in particular the ones which are concave and/or have holes into them.
They are always triangulated at a machine level and this automatic triangulation tends to give artifacts and problems more often than not. This is even worst when you have very elongated ngons with lot of vertices, which is exactly your case here.
In this kind of situation, you have those very long and thin triangles which can cause holes and shading artifacts.

The proper way to manage this (aside from super-pro full quads mesh typology) is to place a few "strategical" cuts to shorten the ngons and "encourage" proper triangulation on concave ngons.

@jackieboyharpster apparently, you are trying to do it with 4 curves selected using the "loft by splines" command, this is clearly user error.
Just delete the 2 straight segments (and the attached existing face of course), then select only the 2 arcs and run the command again.