Chaos Corona Forum
General Category => Gallery => Work in Progress/Tests => Topic started by: Giona on 2020-04-01, 12:28:12
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Hi everyone, as some of you already know I started modeling one of my bikes.
The subject is a Salsa Fargo, a bikepacking/off road touring/singletrack bike.
I'm going to post here the progress of the modeling. Feel free to comment, make questions and suggestions.
This is my bike, but I'm going to change some components in the 3D build:
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/myfargo.jpg)
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Here the first component:
Brooks B17 Special saddle.
In the background you can see some other compontents already modeled, I'll make some proper render of them later.
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/brooks_test_3_web.jpg)
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/brooks_test_clay_web.jpg)
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Have you thought about recording it as speechless timelapse?
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Have you thought about recording it as speechless timelapse?
Nope. I'm not sure it would be cool to see a lot of my trial and errors while modeling :)
Anyway I'll keep in mind and if I'll feel inspired I can try to record something.
Do you mean to record the entire bike build or just each compontent?
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I modeled also the pedals:
Crankbrothers Candy
This is a quick test render, but I'm planning to use Substance Painter to paint more realistic scratches and worn paint in the areas that are most in contact with the shoes.
It will be a nice way to start to learn that software too.
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/candy_test_2_web.jpg)
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/candy_test_2_clay_web.jpg)
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I am jealous, that I dont have this modelling skills. Looks like, it will be a lot of work for you. Looks amazing so far for me. The progress on this will be very interestint.
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I am jealous, that I dont have this modelling skills. Looks like, it will be a lot of work for you. Looks amazing so far for me. The progress on this will be very interestint.
Thanks a lot! Yes, it will be a long work. Bikes has so many little details!
Anyway I'm not a pro in modelling. I'm using this bike project especially to improve my skills in that area.
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Any idea on how to model the welded area between frame tubes?
I tried the welder script, but it produces ugly results. It should be more flat.
It would be nice to be able to replicate those little "waves" that you can see on the weld in the picture attached.
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Good tut about that
https://blog.keyshot.com/local-uv-mapping-creating-realistic-weld-textures-in-keyshot
Best solution is to just sculpt in zbrush, or sculpt the weld in zbrush > grabdoc > then tile it like in above example
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Any idea on how to model the welded area between frame tubes?
I tried the welder script, but it produces ugly results. It should be more flat.
It would be nice to be able to replicate those little "waves" that you can see on the weld in the picture attached.
Joker Martini has a plug-in specifically for that. Worth a look
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Good tut about that
https://blog.keyshot.com/local-uv-mapping-creating-realistic-weld-textures-in-keyshot
Best solution is to just sculpt in zbrush, or sculpt the weld in zbrush > grabdoc > then tile it like in above example
Thanks. There are some interesting resources in the file that he provide.
Joker Martini has a plug-in specifically for that. Worth a look
Yes, I used that one in my previous attempt, but is not good enough.
I could also try to paint it in substance painter.
Will share some results asap.
In the meanwhile, here is another simple component that I modeled.
The chain.
I'll come back to the chain when I'll have the cassette and rear derailleaur modeled. I think it will be difficult to make sure that each link of the chain will fit the teeth of the cassette and chainring.
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/chain_test_02_web.jpg)
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/chain_test_clay_web.jpg)
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Welding test with substance painter.
I'm not sure how to properly unwrap the frame. This is a simple test with just 2 tubes. In attachment yuo can see the unwrap of the second paint test.
How would you make the seams?
With both unwrap test there are problems..
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I think it's turbosmooth modifier ontop of unwrap what's causing problems. Apply small checker texture on the model and you should see distortions along the seams.
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How many hours of not riding your bike? :)
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Love Salsa bikes but the only Salsa thing I've ever owned were some red salsa bar grips (best grips ever)
loving the renders too Giona!
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I think it's turbosmooth modifier ontop of unwrap what's causing problems. Apply small checker texture on the model and you should see distortions along the seams.
Ok, I'll try later. Should I add more loops in the geometry close to the welded areas to prevent deformations caused my turbosmooth?
How many hours of not riding your bike? :)
Too many!! ahah
Love Salsa bikes but the only Salsa thing I've ever owned were some red salsa bar grips (best grips ever)
loving the renders too Giona!
Thanks Peter!
If you're still into biking, consider a Salsa Fargo, with the proper tyres you can ride almost anywhere with it.
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Ok, I'll try later. Should I add more loops in the geometry close to the welded areas to prevent deformations caused my turbosmooth?
Yes, additional loops would help to lessen artifacts, but never eliminate them completely. What you could try, is to replace TS with opensubdiv modifier and try differen UV interpolation methods, some of them are much better than the one that turbosmooth uses.
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Little update about the frame.
Now is welded :)
I used Substance Painter to do it and I'm starting to love that software..
The unwrap is still not perfect, but I'm quite satisfied since I never unwrapped a complex object like this. On top of the unwrap now I used the OpenSubdiv modifier as suggested by Romullus.
In attachment you can see some screenshot of the uv problems.
Maybe I need to use more cuts to flatten the geometry better?
Some test renders. The shaders are not detailed, I'll improve them once the bike is finished.
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/welded_frame_test.jpg)
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/fargo_frame_test.jpg)
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Are you sure you didn't complicate your life needlessly? I can't really zoom into the detail of the photo of the frame, but in my opinion the crown tube in reality doesn't feature any shaping where it connects to bottom frame tube.
I.E, this section didn't need to connect as single mesh and didn't need to be unwrapped together. The crown tube, and both bottom and top frame tube could have been detached meshes with simple tubular unwrap.
But I can be wrong, it's hard to tell from photo. But in render, it creates incorrect highlights. The highlights from bottom frame tube, extend onto crown tube, visible on first image.
Should it be like that?
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Are you sure you didn't complicate your life needlessly? I can't really zoom into the detail of the photo of the frame, but in my opinion the crown tube in reality doesn't feature any shaping where it connects to bottom frame tube.
I.E, this section didn't need to connect as single mesh and didn't need to be unwrapped together. The crown tube, and both bottom and top frame tube could have been detached meshes with simple tubular unwrap.
But I can be wrong, it's hard to tell from photo. But in render, it creates incorrect highlights. The highlights from bottom frame tube, extend onto crown tube, visible on first image.
Should it be like that?
I Think you're right. To fix the highlights distorsion I have to modify the geometry in order to keep the head tube straight in the intersection with the other two tubes.
A bit of chamfer beetween the tubes must be modeled anyway, but the one on the head tube is a bit too much at the moment.
I'll post some update later.
Thanks for the comment!
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A bit of chamfer beetween the tubes must be modeled anyway
But why :-) ? Not nitpicking hah! Curious. I don't think there should be any chamfer between tubing themselves.
Would there be a chamfer in reality? Unless the welds are filled down, but here are full welds. There should be tiny chamfer between the welds and tubing, but that can be done by shader with CoronaEdge map (or more powerfully with mesh blended normals, but I don't know how that is achieved in 3dsMax...)
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A bit of chamfer beetween the tubes must be modeled anyway
But why :-) ? Not nitpicking hah! Curious. I don't think there should be any chamfer between tubing themselves.
Would there be a chamfer in reality? Unless the welds are filled down, but here are full welds. There should be tiny chamfer between the welds and tubing, but that can be done by shader with CoronaEdge map (or more powerfully with mesh blended normals, but I don't know how that is achieved in 3dsMax...)
No problem, is better if we discuss about it, maybe there's a smarter way to do that effect :)
In attachment you can see a photo of the real weld. I'm trying to simulate that "chamfer".
I did a test without any chamfering, just cylinders intersected, and it works only if I use the corona round edges and as additional bump the corona normal generated by substance painter.
But I have to decrease the amount of the normal map a lot, otherwhise the effect looks wrong and the line in the middle appears again.
In the second photo is visible that the weld looks also with a bulge effect.
My first thought was to model the transition beetween the tubes to show that.
Let me know your thoughts!
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Ok now I see, this is just miscommunication :- ). I didn't consider welds (unless filed down) to be a chamfer in this situation.
What you have looks already amazing and works.
Bit of digressing: Reality vs approach I would have tried:
- Reality: Tubes are just connected by barely connecting, weld is placed on top of the connection. Between tubes and welds is "chamfer", the tiny sub-milimeter connection of weld to the tube.
- I would model the same big "chamfer" you did, but only temporary as help. I would detach it, this will become the weld.
- I would revert the tubing back to just tubes with simple cylinder unwrap.
- Detached "chamfer" would become displaced geometry (in geo by subdiv or render time disp, doesn't matter)
- CoronaEdge map would be used to connect the displaced weld to the tubes, this is the last micro connection so the weld isn't just sitting/intersecting on top of tube. This effect is less than 1 milimeter.
(Although blended normals on chamfer would be more accurate, as the chamfer is often changing in size to almost microscopic)
After writing this down, I realize that while this will make unwrapping easier...it might make much more work to blend normals. So my suggestion is kind of shit.
Your solution on other hand is pretty smart and effective, and would much nicely transition to Unreal for example. And you would have to use your technique for hydroformed aluminium frames where tubes are preshaped around connections as well often.
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Ok now I see, this is just miscommunication :- ). I didn't consider welds (unless filed down) to be a chamfer in this situation.
What you have looks already amazing and works.
Bit of digressing: Reality vs approach I would have tried:
- Reality: Tubes are just connected by barely connecting, weld is placed on top of the connection. Between tubes and welds is "chamfer", the tiny sub-milimeter connection of weld to the tube.
- I would model the same big "chamfer" you did, but only temporary as help. I would detach it, this will become the weld.
- I would revert the tubing back to just tubes with simple cylinder unwrap.
- Detached "chamfer" would become displaced geometry (in geo by subdiv or render time disp, doesn't matter)
- CoronaEdge map would be used to connect the displaced weld to the tubes, this is the last micro connection so the weld isn't just sitting/intersecting on top of tube. This effect is less than 1 milimeter.
(Although blended normals on chamfer would be more accurate, as the chamfer is often changing in size to almost microscopic)
After writing this down, I realize that while this will make unwrapping easier...it might make much more work to blend normals. So my suggestion is kind of shit.
Your solution on other hand is pretty smart and effective, and would much nicely transition to Unreal for example. And you would have to use your technique for hydroformed aluminium frames where tubes are preshaped around connections as well often.
I will try your suggestion to see if it will improve the visual. It's an approach similar to the one I tried in the beginning with the script that makes geometry around the intersected tubes.
So practically I should use the "detached chamfer" with a displacement map that replicate the brush texture I used in Substance Painter. Then the CoronaEdge map will take care of the micro connection.
When you talk about blended normals on chamfer, what are you referring to?
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Like this, but I don't know how it's done in 3dsMax. Perhaps with script like this: http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/average-copy-border-vertex-normals
(The picture shows two separate meshes, there is no geometry change or chamfer, connection,etc..)
(https://docs.speedtree.com/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=light-seam-reduction.jpg)
(https://docs.speedtree.com/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=display-normals.jpg)
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Like this, but I don't know how it's done in 3dsMax. Perhaps with script like this: http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/average-copy-border-vertex-normals
(The picture shows two separate meshes, there is no geometry change or chamfer, connection,etc..)
(https://docs.speedtree.com/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=light-seam-reduction.jpg)
(https://docs.speedtree.com/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=display-normals.jpg)
That's interesting, but seems a bit too much work.
Today I'm going to model the wheels. Starting from the disk brake attachment on the hubs.
On the disk I added the dirt left by the brake pads on the outer ring.
To do that I made a custom texture in substance designer. I attached the screenshot of the graph if you're interested.
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/disk_brake_dirt_test.jpg)
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Great job, indeed !
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The wheels are almost finished.
For the tyres I used a displacement map generated in Subtstance Designer with the correct patter of the Vittoria Mezcal tyre. I'll add later more details, logos and name on the tanwall side.
My background is architectural visualization, so I'd like to know if is a correct approach to use a displacement map for tyres or if should be better to model them. I hope not, it would be a nightmare for me :)
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/tyre_test_01.jpg)
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/disk_brake_2-1.jpg)
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After a few days of stop, I'm back modeling the last components of the bike.
Since I'm not an expert in modeling, I'd like to know if there's a way to optimize and speed up the process of modeling the cassette:
Each cog has a different amount of teeth, so I'm starting from a cylinder with the same amount of segments as teeth, in order to model the first one and then clone it.
The problem is that to add some final details, I need the entire cog, and it can be really slow for the bigger cogs.
I need to practice to see if I can add all the details I want into one tooth and then clone it.
Any suggestions? How would you approach this kind of modeling?
Thanks!
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/cassette_wip.jpg)
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I would try to do this as procedurally as i can. Something like this.
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I would try to do this as procedurally as i can. Something like this.
Nice! Thanks for the hint. I never tried that plugin from itoo.
In the beginning I thought about using railclone, but couldn't figured out how to use it for this purpose.
I'll take a look at Clone.
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Little update.
The bike is starting to look like a bike :)
I modeled the cassette using the iToo Clone plugin as suggested by romullus. It's really helpful. The only problem is that the teeth tends to scale a bit and they will never match the chain links as you can see in the test render.
I'll try to find a way to fix that, but before I want to model all the last components.
As always, comments and suggestions are always welcome.
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/fargo_wip_1.jpg)
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/cassette_test.jpg)
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New progress. (I know I'm really slow but sometimes I prefer to ride the real bike instead of modeling the virtual one..)
Now the cockpit is complete. I had to manually adjust the geometry of the handlebar tape in order to conform to the tubes of the shifter and brakes.
The last component left to model is the SRAM Force 1 rear derailleur. It's quite complex for a modeling noob like me.
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Also prefer riding my bike instead of sitting on 3D. :)))
Woow... those seat stays are really that slim?
Your materials & lighting are beautiful.
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The progress of this thread and all the little details you have modeled are amazing!
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New update.
I created the alpha masks for the decals to be painted in Substance Painter and I also tried to add a layer of dirt. I still have to improve to use Painter, and I'm still having some distortion on the UV maps when using the Opensubdiv modifier on the frame.
Later I'll show the problem.
In the meanwhile here you can see the first previews:
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/decals_2.jpg)
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/dirt_test_1.jpg)
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/decals_1.jpg)
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/painter_screenshot.jpg)
The progress of this thread and all the little details you have modeled are amazing!
Also prefer riding my bike instead of sitting on 3D. :)))
Woow... those seat stays are really that slim?
Your materials & lighting are beautiful.
Thanks a lot guys.
@designerman77 yes, the seat stays are quite slim, but not as much as the ones you can find on some modern carbon xc bikes.
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The bike is almost complete, I'm applying the last decals and details to each components using Painter.
In the meanwhile here you can see a quick render to increase the hype :)
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/fargo_silhoutte_m-1.jpg)
Substance Painter details:
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/chainring_painter.jpg)
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/pedals_painter.jpg)
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Finally I managed to find some time to proceed with the Dream Build.
I modeled the taillight and prepared the tyre sidewall material with Substance Designer. It's a bit too shiny at the moment, but I'll fix it.
Here some preview:
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/led_light.jpg)
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/tyre_sidewall.jpg)
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/sidewall_graph_sd.jpg)
Tyre photo reference:
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/sidewall_reference.jpg)
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I was about to ask about progress lately because my popcorn started to go stale. Nice to see a sequel :)
Good Luck
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I was about to ask about progress lately because my popcorn started to go stale. Nice to see a sequel :)
Good Luck
Ahaha sorry for your popcorn :)
Since I started to work again from the office I have less free time for personal projects.
Anyway now I have to wrap this project and make some final images and maybe even a short animation.
Keep following!
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The bike model is finally complete!
In the next days I'm going to create a storyboard for a short animation as well as some still images.
I'm thinking a way to simulate the tyre that inflates. Maybe with some modifiers I can do something.. Any ideas?
In the meanwhile, here another quick test render. This time the bike is out in the wild nature. All the vegetation is custom made with GrowFX.
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/08/fargo_notte_ig_bokeh_q.jpg)
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definitely TyFlow for the inflation +1
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I'm thinking a way to simulate the tyre that inflates. Maybe with some modifiers I can do something.. Any ideas?
For simple inflation, you can use volume/soft selection and animated FFD modifier. If you want something more sophisticated, you can try tyflow and particle skinning. Might be tricky to setup, but should provide convincing result.
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definitely TyFlow for the inflation +1
My first thought as well. Or you can try the 3ds Max Cloth modifier - it can inflate stuff too.
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I never used TyFlow but I definitly need to try it.
I'll see what I can do with the cloth modifier first.
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I'm working on the environment for the exterior detail shot. Most of the vegetation is custom made with GrowFx.
Here a quick test.
Hopefully next week I'll start to publish some finished images and short animation.
(https://gionacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/09/dettaglio_scritta2.jpg)