For this modeling bootcamp, model your computer speakers.

For maximum realism and accuracy, try not to take any shortcuts. If there're two seperate pieces, then by all means, make them two seperate pieces. Bevel all of your edges and don't make excuses for it not looking awesome in the untextured form. I've been told that although texturing can make a model look really good, the best models look great even when untextured. Just so it's clear, don't texture this model at this point, you can later but for the sake of this modeling bootcamp it really doesn't help.

Optional: For some level of uniformity, I suggest that our lighting be similar.
My suggestion:

-From the default choreography remove all of the lights.

-Add a skylight of your choosing. If you have skycast 2, that's great, if not Yves' skylights are great and so are Jeff's fully customizable ones (which can be found here: http://www.shipbrook.com/jeff/animas/skylight/, in most cases the default settings work great. And full instructions for how to use it are here: http://www.shipbrook.com/jeff/animas/skyli...structions.html, it sounds complicated, it makes sense after you've done it once)

-Add a single spotlight so you have shadows where you want them.

-In the camera properties change the background from blue to something greyscale, from black to white.

Good luck. I can't wait to see what you make. Remember to include a wireframe in addition to any renders.

Zack

Cool! May I suggest that you create a project with a choreography and the lighting you feel would be the most effective, then we could download it and model within it?

Just a suggestion.

I agree, Zack, throw together a nice choreography for us to download so that we are all using the same one. Kind of like what Colin is doing for the shaders. Lighting can make or break a scene. This isn't a lighting bootcamp yet

Oh yeah, how embarassing is it going to be to show off my incredibly cheesy cheap Creative Labs $20 KMart specials. I am gonna have to go to BestBuy.com and swipe some pics of some cool speakers so I can pretend that is what I have. Of course mine are more or less just little square boxes so maybe I should stick with them.

Wade

Ok, here's a quick .CHO I set up.

Just replace the cube with your model.
In your render settings:
-Make sure multipass is on and set to 16 pass
-Make sure motion blur is on and set to 20% (once it's turned on this should be the default).

You can customize the spotlight to put shadows where you want them.

Zack

I'm not a lighting expert.

Here's a test render of the choreography.

Anybody who's looking for a cool pair of speakers to model I encourage to search for JBL Creature Speakers.

Zack

I might give this a try this week. Even though I'm using AM2000 still.

Would using boolean cutters on this one be "cheating" ?

My speaker has exactly 6.023x10^23 small holes in the face grill. It's easy to copy and paste a cylinder (heck maybe a flock if that works right) to cut the holes, but making an actual mesh with all those holes...well, I'm thinking it might provide a good challenge if I can come up with a way to do it incrementally...

eric

Maybe a transparency map would work. The holes in the hilt of the image below were made entirely with a transparency map. I don't know if this is a good answer but it may work. If you put a single black patch behind the speaker grill and used a transparency for the holes it might come out okay.

Wade

That's one thing I would probably never actually model. So go ahead and just leave it blank.

Here's mine so far. The back is not really complete, and there are some creases to fix. Hardest part was putting in the holes on the front face.

And the wireframe

That looks great!

The one thing that strikes me as a bit odd (besides the creases you mentioned) is the center cone, it feels like it could use another spline ring near the center.

For the future, a shaded+wireframe view is a little bit less confusing because you don't see the lines in the back intersecting with the ones in the front.

Zack