Hey all, I'm Leo from Switzerland and I'm 28 years old.
I work as a software engineer but I've been a long time lurker on Polycount and always marvelled at the stuff you guys made. Recently I started toying in UDK to try to make a level for Red Orchestra 2, which is a WW2 FPS. I quickly realised that without getting some skill at modelling to make my own props I would never achieve anything great.

So I've followed several tutorials for 3ds max and now I think I need to start making stuff myself without following instructions to really learn how to model. There are a lot of stuff I don't know about so I hope you guys will be able to give me some advice.

First thing I decided to model and to keep it simple was a mug.
Here is the reference picture I used. Don't laugh!


My first ever model.. Since I don't know what I'm doing I went freestyle, started with a cyclinder and carried on from there. I had some issue with the handle which probably shows, I started doing it with small extrude and trying to get an angle. Then I realized I could extrude along spline and did that for the rest.


Should I use turbosmooth or not? I noticed it smoothed the whole thing nicely, added plenty of geometry.

The mug looks good, but can't really give you much more advice on it since it's so simple. Just throwing out ideas but, you should try making something like sci-fi panels or props. Those tend to really fun to make and you'll learn alot when it comes to modeling as well

Your mug looks OK but I think the cruve on the handle is a bit off, as is the way you mate the handle to the mug - usually the handles are even on the top and bottom and in your smoothed version they lack the subtle separation that comes from the way they're manufactured.

The turbosmoothed, high-geometry version would be more ideal for baking normal maps from, but the regular, unsmoothed version is not well optimized for games. I think it's foolhardy to suggest specific polycounts, but in general you want to avoid two things:

adding polys or tris that do not add to or modify the silhouette or shading (ie, the many edge loops you have running around the mug, or the vertical slice dow nthe middle of the handle)

polys or tris that are too small to see at the ideal viewing distance/angle - unless this is a First Person Mug for a First Person MugSmasher, no one is going to get that close to the object. If you zoom out to the average or ideal view distance with wireframe mode on, and multiple polygons are reducing to a single pixel, that's a good suggestion that you should remove polygons from that area.

This is a fine start but I think you will improve faster if you pick more complex objects, pick a specific goal for the object (modeling a high poly, modeling a high and baking to a low poly, texturing, getting something into UDK, etc), and follow through all the way.

Thanks a lot for your comments Ghostscape. I probably won't modify this mug tho, as you suggested I'd like to make a complete game prop now.

I'm going to try to make a metal barrel. I choose the following reference picture.


Something that is not very clear in my mind, I suppose a model should be one single entity? What I mean is, for this I'd start with a cylinder obviously but how should I model the smaller detail? For example the hole to fill it, I'd probably start with a small cylinder but how would I attach this to the main barrel shape? Do I even have to attach it? Or can I group the two objects together and place the small hole on top of the barrel?

I hope I'm clear enough in what I'm saying it's hard to find the correct words. If not I'll make a small drawing.

I think I understand what you mean. There's no need for the model to be just one mesh. It can be combined by multiple meshes, whatever works for you really I prefer having multiple meshes instead wasting polygons with trying to keep it as one.

Thanks Eoq.

So I tried to work on this and got the following, it's not perfect and certainly not as close to the ref as I'd like but it's a start. Now if I'd like to add this to UDK I guess I'd have to make a low poly model and bake normal map from the high poly? Is that correct? Is there anything I should modify on my high poly?