Chippendale furniture

After a brief conundrum I decided not to go for the CG Challenge but to focus instead on the second homework submission for CG Cookie modelling class. 

I imagined an upper-class parlour, with an ornate chair that has a top hat and a pair of gloves lying on the seat. It turned out slightly differently.

For one, I spent too much time browsing through different kinds of furniture. Eventually, I chose the Chippendale chair—and table. Do I know anything about Chippendale furniture? No. Did I choose it because it looked cool and sounded like my favourite cartoon characters? Absolutely. (Turns out the two rascals were actually named after the furniture designer. The more you know...)

At this stage, I abandoned the concept of putting the hat on the seat, as it would partially cover the lovely (and fairly difficult to make) back rest. Then I abandoned the concept of the hat. And the gloves. Not because I didn't want to create them but the wall looked terribly empty and sad. If I had more time and the homework didn't ask for three things, I would have probably placed something on the table. But as it played out, the owners of this parlour have fallen on bad times and could only afford to keep these three items. (*Shrug*)

As for the actual modelling, I didn't use any breakthrough techniques. Just the good old Extrude—SubSurf—holding edges—MORE holding edges—oh crap, I forgot to extrude this bit and now I have too many faces to work with—techniques. Some parts I envisioned better than others. The ornamental side of the table? Dead simple. Get a plane, divide it into squares, delete squares that make up crosses, put it into an array and Bob's your uncle. One of the downsides of my table workflow was that I had to apply the array. I wanted to join the table pieces into one mesh, and the array would have affected the whole table. I could have parented the separate pieces to an empty... and now that I come to think about it, I'm not sure why I didn't. It sure has problems of its own, but it probably wouldn't have mattered in this scene. Oh well.

The back rest, on the other hand, was a bit of a nightmare. The leaf shape is a curve turned into a mesh, and the extruded bits are... well, extruded. In a particularly loose manner because they were rotated in such a nasty way that none of the orientation modes would let me do what I wanted to. I'm not entirely sure where I went wrong with that but I had reworked it so many times that I decided just to go with this version.

And that will be all for this week. As a bonus, I've put together a short collection of phases the room has gone through (including one where the carpet is eating the table). Next week, I'll check what the next challenge is, and I'll either work on that, or go for another animation—possibly combined with a short static scene, because animations make for poor blog post thumbnails.