Week 10 - Espresso Machine

 Week 10 - Espresso Machine

For our end of term task for 3D, we were assigned a blueprint of an Espresso Machine with aims to recreate the model showing considerations of clean topology, Ngons and 10 clean renders. 

When creating the model, I had to consider dividing it into separate parts to help keep cleaner topology. To start I began modelling the main body of the Espresso Machine. I started with a Cube Mesh and created three edge loops and extruded out the middle part of the body and the front and back to hold the tray and water container. I then created another edge loop on the middle part to create the front face. To create the front face for the buttons I created an extruded offset which then allowed me to extrude the outer face and get the frame. The vents on the top were incorrect as they were facing the wrong ways. This happened because of the number of edge loops I made on the front were not the cleanest and made it very difficult to create them. To fix this I should have done the vents before the face and used an extrude offset to keep them all the same size.

 To create the buttons on the face I created edge loops and began circularising the faces, I had to do this 5 times. Due to the size, two circles were made with more than 4 faces, creating a more rounded shape. Because the topology wasn't perfect, the faces on these circles were very messy and hard to work with. To fix this I used poke face which created a cleaner topology and made it much easier for the extrude offsets I needed to make. The square buttons were also created with extrude offset, making sure keep faces together was off so that I could control and manage their shapes at the same time. 

Creating the circle underneath the head of the model was made in the same way with circularise and using offset to get the thickness. One issue here, however, is the topology in the inside. Unlike the faces of the buttons, I did not use poke face of target weld to clean up the topology so there were unnecessary quads and tris. 

To make sure the tray was of the correct shape, I used the existing face on the body and duplicated it. This gave me the correct size mesh that I could begin to work with to create the tray model. This was a simple task of using extrude offset. Again, to get the correct shape of the vent inside I used duplicate of the existing face inside the tray. The vent was problematic as it contained an awful lot of edge looping to get the correct amount of faces to circularise. I tried to circularise them all at once but this wasn't working properly so I had to circularise each hole individually. Although this took a long time to the overall outcome was perfect. 

For the plug, the wire was created with the pen tool, creating a NURB. With bonus tools installed, I could covert this NURB into a polygon using the convert to tube tool and editing the settings to get the desired results. Originally I attempted to keep the plug in the same geometry as the wire but this was not a good idea because the topology was extremely messy and was creating too many Ngons and an unnecessary high poly-count. Instead, I created a new mesh for the plug with a cleaner topology for the curvature shape. For the container, I again duplicated the back face for the shape and extruded it out. I wanted to make sure the container was hollow so I offset the face on top and extruded this inside to create the hollow shape. For the container lid, I duplicated the face of the top of the container before the offset was made. This was then a simple extrude into the lid shape. 

One big problem I created with my model was using bevel on all the edges. By using bevel I was able to get curvature around all the model, however, the amount of Ngons created was very high. To solve this, I began making more edge loops to connect to these Ngons to create quads as I wanted to avoid as many tris as I could. However, one way I could have done this better would have been to use target weld and welded these extra vertices to get quads without making unneeded edge loops that ruin the clean topology. 

When rendering the Model, I used Arnold Renderer like before, making sure to pay consideration to Lighting and Camera placement. For texturing the model I used AIStandardSurface which was perfect for getting the plastic and metal texture in the final render. One mistake I made here was that I did not know was that the texture had presets for plastics, metals and more. This would have been much easier and quicker than creating all these textures manually in the settings. However, the results were still great in my opinion. One mistake I noticed in the first two renders was that I had created two shadows from my model. This was because I had used two directional lights which basically means I had created two suns in my render. To fix this I removed one of the directional lights and stuck to the one I already had. Another thing I should do next time is using the Arnold lights such as Skydome which creates a better light preset so my renders don't come out so dark.