@solo said:

Thanks chris, here is one with faucet turned on. (if I remember correctly you did something similar using Podium)

The water is brilliant! And thanks for the details on your method--it's essentially what I came up with myself (ie the lathe operation and intersecting I mentioned). It's certainly acceptable, but not perfect, with the main culprit being the sharp edge where the bumpout meets the bowl of the sink (as kwistenbiebel noted).

I hadn't thought using follow me, as dale mentioned (thx for the tip!), so I'll give that a try, although merging this with the rim of the sink might be tricky. Solo, you mentioned "more bevelling" that could be done--were you referring to improving the bumpout/bowl join? The other annoying thing about the sink is that the profile of the bevel on the top edge of the bumpout is much different than the profile of the bevel around the perimeter of the sink, creating another (to me) difficult situation when these meet. It seemed like such a simple object when I began!

gksl4: Hexagon looks quite interesting: there's a Mac version, not to much $$, but I couldn't find a demo to try out. I'll do some more research and see what I can find.

karlfucious: silo does look interesting, but it seems to be heavily slanted toward pure organic form and character creation, no? Would it be suitable to creating objects with purely regular (although somewhat complex) shapes? Whatever the case, the intro/tutorials on their website have made me look at my bank account closely. As spectacular as sketchyFFD is, to see the tweak tool (I think) in operation was amazing!

I've been using SU for more than a year now (it's the only modeling prog I've ever used) and I am thrilled with its capabilities. However...I find more and more frequently that I'm running into situations where SU just does not seem to be the right tool. For example, here's a vessel sink I've been trying to model:

It's possible to do a quick-and-dirty version, using a lathe operation for the overall shape and intersecting a cylinder (for the bump out that the faucet sits on). The problem with this method is the unrealistic transition between the cylinder/bump out and the sink which are rounded/filleted in real life but crude intersections in the model. I can round the top edge of the bumpout, but where it intersects with the sink rim it will be messy. The smooth intersections actually within the sink itself...I can't imagine a way to accomplish this other than through lots of hand stitching.

The best success I've had is with subdivide and smooth, but it doesn't seem to be really meant for relatively high precision modeling like this and preparing a proxy is finicky and time-consuming--although maybe I'm just doing it wrong.

So: are there ways I've not thought of to model objects like this (and similar items with intersecting compound curves) in SU or should I be looking at some other prog for this kind of thing? MoI looks promising but runs terribly on a Macbook; Rhino runs ok but is $$ and looks complicated.

Any thoughts?

@unknownuser said:

The lighting is good I am just not sure why every bed is always unkept. More and more bedroom renders use the same unkept bedding....never understood that.

Scott

I think it's because it's difficult to model a made-up bed with enough subtlety so that the counterpane/duvet/bedding etc don't look fake--it takes lots of slight surface variations and attention to detail where fabrics fold and drape. With crumpled up bedding, you don't run into this problem. But you're right: unless the crumpled-up bedding is used to create a mood (which means we should probably also be seeing slippers, the morning newspaper etc) then it can look odd and contrived.

You might also find something at http://www.openfootage.net, which has a lot of concrete textures

Cagework, rendered in Artlantis, which is not really meant for this kind of thing, but...