I don’t get to play as much as I used to with the tech support load these days, but a calm day on phones allowed me to drag out this dusty old project I did years ago for a toy company. I added some details, changed some pretty significant stuff I didn’t like about their original art direction and did a quick render.
This was bread and butter stuff from back in the day for me- and I’m so enjoying all the enhancements in v8.
It used to be trying to tear back into a finished model was really a pain… but with push pull, inset, and the cut tools on gumball, it’s no longer the chore it used to be.
The other fun part, is this is one single solid chunk of a polysurface… sub object material assignment allows you to make renderings without having to extract surfaces.
Sure, for most of the toy stuff I did, the client wanted a solid, watertight part that they could 3d print…that meant I had to do the entire vehicle as one solid “chunk” then verify it had no naked edges so it could be printed.
That’s great for production needs, but sucks for rendering because all the surface are joined. Typically you’d have to go back and extract surfaces, then separate them by layer or material in order to assign different colors and materials to the parts. This now creates a “non-watertight model” since the parts are split apart to make them easy to select.
Since about Rhino 6, you can now simply ctrl+shit+click a piece of a polysurface and apply a sub object material to it, removing the need for two models.
The simplest example is to make a cube that is a single closed polysurface, and assign a material to only one face this way. Notice the cube is still a cube…but you can assign a different material to each individual face.
You may not see this work in one of your cool YouTube tutorials, but I hope you continue making toy tutorials. For me, who is starting to use Rhino, following the toy plane and boat tutorial has allowed me to learn Rhino commands in an enjoyable and fun way.
Their other tutorials are just as great and more complex but I think that making a model of a toy makes learning fun for many, including me.