By Peter Blood - 6 Years Ago
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Hi guys:
I needed 6 medieval chairs for the anteroom of the Duke of Shorns audience hall in my WIP. I found a great looking chair at 3d warehouse but the poly count was high. 58,000. That would bring the overall count to 348,000 just for the 6 chairs, never mind the avatars etc to populate the hall. So I decided to build the prop myself using the Warehouse prop as a guide. The 'new' prop came in at just under 15,000 polys for an overall saving of 258,000 polys. I don't believe I lost quality in the build so I'm pretty happy.
I did a little work refining the design and embellishing it.
Lower poly count means less hanging up on your comp and faster render times.
pete
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By sonic7 - 6 Years Ago
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Hi Pete - I'm impressed and very keen to know your approach on this... What program did you use for your construction? .... sketchup? .... iClone? .... or something else? Steve.
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By Peter Blood - 6 Years Ago
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sonic7:
I used the 3D blocks provided free in iclone and the primitives set from the market place. ( $0.80 American) I started a new project, set the ending frame next to the starting frame on the timeline. This is to keep from accidentally moving the the timeline forward. The prop needs to be constructed in the first frame to be properly saved.
From there I used middle bottom for all of my original placement settings. I centered the Warehouse prop at 0.00 and made sure it was rotated to 0.00 as well. I started with a box. I textured it to the wood grain I wanted. (Google image) This box became the seat. I placed it and contracted (or expanded) to size. Then. I made a duplicate, it carried the texture with it, and resized it to fit the tall back of the chair. I repeated the process to construct all the pieces of the original chair. Most of the pieces were some form of box shape. I used some arcs at the top, and some primitive shapes for the embellishments and seat cushion [a Kindle ]
That's pretty much it. I'd say 95% of this construction was the same box, copied and reshaped to fit. Hope that helps man, maybe I'll do a step-by-step on something.
pete
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By sonic7 - 6 Years Ago
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Excellent Peter .... I'm mostly impressed by the cushion - To me (one who's fairly at home with sketchup), I would have thought of both sketchup and iclone's approach akin to 'minecraft' lol .... whereby you literally do build everything with 'boxes'. But when it comes to more 'organic' shapes with 'curves', and things that are 'bulbous' or objects that must look like 'cloth & material' - that's where somewhat of a 'mystery' sets in for me. You've got me seriously thinking as to whether I could make all my 'sets' inside iClone. Mind you - I do really - and I mean *really*, like sketchup's 'navigation' it feels so much more intuitive (to me at least). You can use multiple mouse commands to do everything. I do find I'm forever clicking up on the top of iClone's UI to keep changing mouse function - maybe I'm doing it wrong - but yeah back & forth, back & forth. Whereas with sketchup it's so easy.
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By Peter Blood - 6 Years Ago
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I haven't worked with sketch-up at all. In the 'primitives' pack there are some curved edge items. Here's some examples.
I used the 2nd from the right for the cushion, but I could have used the 3rd from the right as well. Your best results may be a combination of the two, sketch-up an 3D blocks.
Here's a shot of the uncompleted anteroom with chairs in place.
pete
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By Postfrosch - 6 Years Ago
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Hi Pete, i see an nice Room with nice Avatars Your Chair is a good work Greets Werner
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By sonic7 - 6 Years Ago
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Pete - that 'curtain' inside your anteroom - was that imported or did you make that iClone as well? (If you did I'd be really impressed)
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By Christy0 - 6 Years Ago
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Hi Pete, Great looking chair, great work for use of the iClone 3D Props. Maybe to save poly count in your shots you could use the old trick of rendering a chair at different angles you need in transparent png's and place as billboard / layers in screenshot.
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By Peter Blood - 6 Years Ago
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Thanks for the comments everyone. They are much appreciated.
sonic7: I'm going to have to burst your bubble sonic. Although I originally had the idea for a curtain there, I decided, as this was the entrance to the Dukes audience hall, he might want something a bit thicker to keep out prying ears. So I went with a door, well two actually.
ChristyO That's an idea I hadn't seen nor thought of. This room, with the Avatars in it so far is only 450k and I can handle about 1 million without slowing down (I've been up close to two million) so I probably will stay with the props on this one, however that is a great idea and I will look for places to use it. I'm kind of big on billboards these days, in fact, the candle flames are all on billboards.
And thank you for the compliment on the prop. Coming from a prop master such as yourself it means alot.
Here's the basic layout of the shot. "I've got a lot of tweaking to do Lucy!!"
pete
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By sonic7 - 6 Years Ago
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Yes, of course they're 'doors' duh Actually I have a couple of very thick (*real*) 'velvet' curtains that are exactly the 'color and sheen' shown in your pic lol.
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