As stated in the title, I tinkered around with trying out different ways to model! For my test subject, I've used my old Navi model as a baseline to try and recreate with cleaner topology and fewer polygons.
The first program that I tried to use for this experiment was Zbrush.
I did initially have a good time using the boolean operations that Zbrush had. The live boolean button is very useful for previewing what the end mesh is going to look like. However, I started to run into problems when attempting to use ZRemesher to retopologise the model. I was getting really ugly five-star points that I wasn't liking the look of. There was also the problem of the inside of the drill holes coming out really gross. I think that if I gave myself the time to really get in depth with how Zbrush can retopologise a model, I probably would have gotten a good outcome. However, it just wasn't working well enough for what I needed and the time, so I've ditched it for the time being.
What I tried next was a fairly new program called MagicaCSG.
This program didn't feel too bad to model with, despite my inexperience with it. There was a few problems I had with the UI and how some shortcuts worked, but not too bad. Problems started to arise when I tried to make the spherical part of the model that's smaller than the outer shell. I couldn't get it looking how I wanted to, regardless of how much resolution increases I was doing. It simply didn't look as sharp as I wanted. This program is really fun and can be used to make some interesting shapes. However, I don't think that it's a program that I should be using for this task. This much more of a free-form program than what I'm used to. There's also the fact that this is still pretty early in development. It's still only around version 0.4. There's also the fact that the free version of the software isn't the most up to date version of it. That's on the creator's Patreon. To be fair, though, their asking price is very cheap for a monthly subscription of an a program that is in active development.
All in all, I don't think that these programs are useful to be for the current task I've got in my hands. They're both very fun to use in their own right, but they just aren't what I'm looking for right now. I will more than likely just stick to Maya and figure out something in there instead. This doesn't mean that I'm giving up on making a better Navi model! In fact, I've got a little bit of a redesign in my head that I want to try modelling to see how it pairs up with the original one. Nothing is final, but I've got a few ideas that I'm willing to try.
This is a bit of a shorter post, but that's just because I didn't really do much this past week. I do hope there's some cooler stuff that I'll be able to post next time, though!
Thank you and good-bye for today!
SteveMaddenFootball
How did you get interested in 3D?
Ultrapuff (Updated )
I think what really spurred me into doing 3D were those old GMod TF2 videos from 2010 or around that time frame. I wanted to be a chemist when I was younger, but I reckon those videos are really what changed my mind. It took a while for that passion to emerge, though. I didn't really do much 3D stuff until around 2017 or 2018 I believe. That's when I started using SFM and making posters and trying to do super simple animations. Then I swapped over to Blender and getting the basics of what I know about modelling, then I eventually started using Maya.
I basically owe my entire passion of 3D to TF2 lol