Overview of Modelling the Table

By

Pat Connelly

I think there are two absolute necessities for scale modelling real objects.  The first and foremost are abundant accurate measurements.  You need to know the dimensions of everything.  I originally drew a quick sketch and penciled in some numbers.  I later went back and made more measurements.  From now on I will make a copy/print of actual photographs of the object - mainly front and side but both sides if they are different and the back if necessary.  Then, I will write the measurements right on the pictures. 

The second most useful item is accurate perpendicular pictures of the object in all possible views.  A top down view might be appropriate.  I really got tired of walking back to my dining room with tape measure in hand.  My next object will be made so much more efficiently.

After all the pieces were modelled, I assembled them ( actually a piece at a time because I was anxious to see if they fit the ever growing model ) keeping the table as a grouped object.  Wood has a definite grain pattern which varies from piece to piece and I did not want to spend a lot of time selecting faces and creating subgroups, which would have been a viable alternative.  I used only the hardwood.itx imagine texture on almost all the pieces.  I tried guessing the colors without much success.   I pulled my scanned real photograph into photoshop and sampled colors and translated RGB values to Imagine.  This got me real close in a hurry.  Getting the grain right was just tweaking the texture controls until my objects grain matched the tables grain.  The base color is 106:65:45.  Hardness is 75.  Specular is white, probably should be a different color.  Everything else is off.  In the hardwood.itx the second color is 30:20:5.  The grain is 0:0:0.  The bump adjust is -0.1 and the grain spacing is 20.  The noise magnitude and velocity for one and two are 2, 0.3, 0.6, and 2.  I applied the fakely texture on the top alone to get a shine - altering the reflect values.  This has been described elsewhere.

For the gold plate I tried the metals texture but didn't like it much and did not want to diddle with it.  I used one of the old quick attributes textures from an earlier version of Imagine which worked nicely.  The hardness is 20.  The base color is 232:134:0 , while the specular color is 255, 190,36.  As this is a modelling tutorial, I am sure there are better applications of textures and I welcome any suggestions or comments.  Also, this is only one method to make a complex object, but it worked for me.

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