Cello Project

I love this stuff - I could spend another 40 hours easily working on this particular model, but I figure that at this very early stage of my learning about Blender I’m better off iterating.

There’s SO much that’s wrong with this. I’m really shaky with texturing, the cello mesh is way too heavy for what it does and needs to be refactored, and so on and so forth.

Still, what I’ve been able to do I owe a great deal to Alex’s video course that I found on Udemy. I’m very happy to have found it. :slight_smile:

Have a good Memorial Day, for those who celebrate it.

Mark

Mark that is awesome! Great model and render. I am happy to have helped you along on your journey in Blender and definitely see some great things for you in Blender! Can’t wait to see more :slight_smile:

First of all, I want to say great job overall! This really looks nice.

Iteration is a great idea and it really can be beneficial to not get caught up in endlessly tweaking to the point you never move on to new stuff. If you do decide to tweak this one, one thing I’d comment on this one is that it feels like the cello is a bit too deep. I think it would look a little more correct about 3/4 as deep as it currently is, but that’s just a guess.

And whether you change it on this one or keep this in mind for future projects… When you’re doing your seams for the textures, think about where seams would naturally occur. For example, with a lot of your wood instruments, the grain follows all along the curvature with seams more around the neck and at the bottom. there might possibly be one where you have here, too… but I believe the grain on that strip would be turned to match the others rather than running against it.

With all the steps, it can really help to use references to make sure you’re making things as accurately as possible. Everything from the modeling to the texturing to animation (if you’re doing that) can always be better by measuring it against a reference. Even if you’re doing something that doesn’t really exist, it will be based in some ways on real things. Try to find them from multiple angles. The reason for this is there are always so many details that we often overlook or miss when we’re trying to do it from memory that we’ll catch when we use reference. It’s the one thing that can make the biggest impact in all stages.

Still, this is really good as it is. Keep up the great work!

On the thing about seams… think of it like this. A shirt naturally has seams across the top of the shoulder, around where the sleeve connects to the rest of the shirt, on the bottom side of the sleeve, and down the sides of the shirt. These seams are where individual pieces of fabric are sewn together. So when you are making your seams for textures, these would be natural places to place seams.

The same thing is true for any 3D object. Think about the different pieces that would be pushed together to and maybe even sanded down to make a smooth, flat surface. Whether it’s a table, a desk, a musical instrument… they’re all pieced together by multiple parts, so finding where there would naturally be seams will go a long way to helping with the way the textures will piece together. Keep this in mind as you’re working on future projects!

Thank you Grady, and thank you for the texturing tips. :slight_smile: