Started with reviewing just the Add edge loops tools and also using the multicut tool to create faces between verticies and to clean up geometry. Learned about using the center pivot and general tidiness of keeping a scene tidy or troubleshooting. Also learned about creating shelves and using the sculpt geometry tool, keeping with the themes of good topology with models.
.After this we went about reviewing using Booleans on objects to use other objects to dent into another’s mesh. With the poly count on each object being used directly correlating to how “Smooth” a boolean cut object would be.
While this does create some messy and illegal topollogy, on simple things that require very little texturing this should be alright, I Decided to use these techniques to work on making a small cheese block.
I originally wanted to use the orange juice preset texture as it originally looked the closest to what i wanted to get in terms of colour, but this added a lot of reflection and really just ended up not looking a whole lot like cheese, so i used the rubber preset and tweaked the colours from there.
The cheese block needed a lot more detail so i started over, added shaped it out into the way i wanted it to be and added some more divisions, which immediately caused some issues with the mesh. I Cleaned this up just by using the smoothing tool in sculpting as deleting any faces or verticies would make for some really messy topology.
After this i shaped out a rough shape of what i wanted this cheese wheel to look like, as this didn’t quite have the shape i wanted still, and used the soft selection tool settings to make the shape of the cheese very straight as it’s meant to look like a cut from a cheese wheel and while selecting it with a curved falloff radius soft selection as opposed to linear it was looking really curved.
After this i went about using boolean intersections to cut multiple different holes and then using the sculpting tools to push and pull around the mesh to give it an organic look. While the holes look a little bit almost crusty or crumbly, this is made to look like cheese which has a very organic and random shape, so this actually worked in the favour of the shape as opposed to a problem.
Next i went about just fixing some of the textures and going about getting the feel of the colour right, adjusting the transmission as i wanted some of the thinner parts to have light come through them more and giving it a noise bump map as previously it was mostly just a uniform colour with no real bump to it. I went through multiple iterations on the colour and the bump trying to get it right.
This was the final render after tweaking the noise bump map for a while.
After this i learned about Nurb objects and their differences between polygonal objects, specifically in them being able to handle intersecting objects easier with how it uses splines and curves to generate shapes. I Started with simply making a boolean on a polygonal object and then doing the same with Nurbs objects, with the process being different between the two, having to intersect a Nurb object first and then Trim the object afterwards.
While these may look like the same result, they actually aren’t, with the Nurbs object being a hollow object now with a hole in it, and the polygonal object still being a whole object, but with an added face through the difference boolean appearing to “cut out” the shape. A texture could be added to the new face of the polygonal object, while there is no new face on the nurbs object, but an absence of one. Next i went about combining two nurbs objects using the same methods, but combining two nurbs objects into one to make it a complete object with no missing faces. I originally had some issues with this as i had intersecting seams that made using the trim selection tool split into two and made creating fillet not work, but after fixing this small issue it worked much better in combining the two objects.
Next i took this into the live viewer and it was looking a little bit jagged on the edges still, so i upped the number of isoparms (which would be the equivalent of a surface on a poly object) to make the object smoother.
After this i added a checkerboard texture, showing off the clean UV’s you can get from a Nurbs object as opposed to a polygonal when doing Booleans.
Lastly i converted it to a polygonal object, using different methods of doing so like triangulated, Using Quads and Matching the render tessellation to get small but different results such as smoother spheres.
Lastly i made a quick but small render of all the different conversions side by side using Arnold and having a standard surface texture with a checkerboard colour and high reflections.