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Modeling octagonal bulge shape
I’m trying to figure out the best way to model a particular shape, and I keep getting imperfections and was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on what might be the best approach.
This is what I’m working on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgliLY_9al0&feature=youtu.beAs you can see, there is a shiny octagonal area in the center that is rounded so that it reflects the circular soft box in front of it. If you watch the top left edge, you can see that the reflection ripples as it glides over shiny surface, and as far as I can tell, it is because there are imperfections in the geometry of the surface that is resulting in a distorted reflection.
The shape I’m going for is kinda like the cap of an oil tank, except that the cap starts from a rounded octagon shape instead of a circle.
I’m currently using lathe nurbs over a couple different shapes:
The imperfections are probably coming in part from the fact that I freehanded the transitional shapes. I started with the first rounded octagonal spline (which was created by someone else in illustrator), duplicated it a couple times and then moved points around and resized.
I am going to try using illustrator to create the transitional spines (just so they are accurate), but I also tried modeling the shape from scratch (low poly cylinder to hypernurbs) which looked like crap.
Other than perfecting the splines, I’m out of ideas.
I’d appreciate anyone’s thoughts on this.
Thanks for your help!
