Do you remember the quarantine Ferrari-WIP?
Posted some progress here:

https://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=73991

@rich o brien said:

Grazie amico mio

Your Italian is 100% spot-on

I was just thinking about you recently because I wanted to share with you some tricks I fine-tuned based on your old wrap-r/substance tutorial as a starting point.
I shared a first insight of the workflow in this post.

https://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=73991

@rich o brien said:

this hidden tool of QuadFace Tools...

...which I think holds the record for the 2nd deepest plugin menu entry in the world...

Agreed. Thomas should bury it a couple of nesting levels deeper, so that nobody aside us know about it.

Meanwhile I created myself a button for it using ToolbarEditor.

Of course I chose the Pollo icon to celebrate the R&D stage

Here is the icon itself, in case Thom wants to include that toolbar button in future relases

Here in this video is a first mockup/proof-of-concept for some animation I started to put toghther during lockdown.
Now that I'm done with the car I will reload it and continue to work on the scenes..
Stay tuned for more updates in the summer.

Finally I exported the model to 3dsMax using QFT obj exporter to render it in Vray, and imported as straight .skp into Unity3d where I plan to do animations and interactive stuff.
I then exported a GLTF from Unity and imported in Blender just to convert it in binary GLB which is more compact and convenient.
Below is a screnshot from Unity inspector:

Here's a short video of the first export/rendering test with Substance PBR textures reloaded (order of appearence in the YouTube description).

Each texture set have different resolution and optional channels (like opacity, emissive, AO) depending on what is needed.

Some view from Substance Painter including the full car and a little texture-set breakdown.
Notice the double UDIM tile on the body, rejoined with the aero props and brake calipers with no wasted space.

More detailed views from low poly stage.

Some view from the low poly unsubdivided stage

And more

More stuff

During pandemic I choose to put togheter this humble tribute to one of the best racing car ever, as a pastime while I were forced to stay at home even in my spare time and weekends.

Here's my entry for the infamous Ferrari F-2004 one of the most dominant and best looking formula one car which ever hit the tracks.

100% of the modeling and UV's are done in Sketchup Pro 2020 + Quadface Tools + VertexTools2 + Sub-D + SplitTools + JointPushPull alongside other plugins.
I did the UV unwrapping using the Wrap-r plugin.
I only did the texturing outside of sketchup using Substance for direct texture painting and Photoshop to create all the decals/logo stuff.

I hope you enjoy it.

@ramonbastos said:

Hello! I noticed that when I use SubD, it creates some polygons that are not really necessary, making the file bigger. You can see in the example below:

[attachment=1:155faezl]<!-- ia1 -->panela 01.png<!-- ia1 -->[/attachment:155faezl]

[attachment=0:155faezl]<!-- ia0 -->Screenshot_53.png<!-- ia0 -->[/attachment:155faezl]

I tried using TT's cleanup, looks like it removes some "random" lines. Of course its not random, but it leaves a lot of lines that I can erase and keep the same geometry.

Any tips on how to optimize it?

The proper way to remove those quads triangulations when it is possible (for those quads which are coplanar, that's why you can erase them) would be, after you are done with modeling, to convert the mesh into "plain mesh" and then select all and run the "remove triangulation" command from QuadFaceTools.

Please notice that you are visually erasing those triangulation at Sketchup interface level, but at "machine level" those triangles are still present, so the model will not perform any better in any render engine or game engine, because stuff need to be triangulated in GPU.
What actually matters in therms of model performances are mainly the amount of vertices, the number of drawcalls, the size/compression of the textures, good UV's (if you have too many UV-islands the machine will see much more vertices than you see in the viewport).

Actually I tend to keep those triangles, because they make for proper exporting files.
If you don't triangulate, many external formats/engines/applications will triangulate them in some automated way and you can get weird results, in particular smoothing/texturing artifacts.

If you are into unwrapping/game engine stuff, like I am, you have to love those triangulations and want to have full control over them, instead of having some weird algorithm doing unpredictable stuff in background.

Nice work as ever.
And most of all, it's great to see you back here, Rich.

Glad that it helped

Yes, you can basically add some 8-sided circle and then loft/bridge with existing topology.
You should also try to use way less segments for the top rounded part and avoid those nasty star poles (those vertices where 6 edges are connected).

Played with it another bit in the afternoon.
I think it has decent overall shape and improved topology in the top handle.
Also fixed bad naming and pivot orientation, scaled it properly and saved it in skp 2017 version.
Attached here the improved model.

Sub-D_DamixaWaterTap.skp

@alvis said:

there are people who do it better than me.

Thank you man, I really appreciate it from you.
You were one of them I really looked at as "teacher" in the past years, when I was at the beginning.
Your clever modeling has always been a source of inspiration for me.

I believe in this case, you did it right with the vertex count (8 is the way here), but you had to rotate everything 45° and then the topology naturally follow along.
I did the exact same mistake on first try, then realized I had to rotate stuff and having the base octagon facing flat forward.

This is the base mesh, if you want to play with.

Sub-D_Faucet_LITE.skp

Here's my entry. As Alvin said, photo reference is bad.
I just quickly eyballed this, focusing mainly on the proper topology.
I believe the shape can be perfected a bit, but the topology itself should be basically something like this.
(I did it solid just for the sake of fun)