Antique clock

Another week's passed, another render's finished. I'm quite proud of this one but I'm still going to point out all the flaws it has. Buckle up, ladies and gentlemen, the show begins now.

I'm always stumped for ideas when it comes to hard-surface modelling, so I asked around and got a specific topic to focus on: something antique. An hour of browsing later I stumbled upon this clock on eBay that ticked all the right boxes for me. It is ornate enough to be interesting but not too much to be exceedingly hard to model. Shortly after finding it I set out to work. About five minutes in I realized I wouldn't be able to use 2.8. I wanted to model the clock to scale but "apply scale" seems to be broken at the moment. Well, Blender 2.79 it is, then.

I decided to put into practice some of the tips I gathered in recent months. One of them was to abandon the use of holding edges and switch to a Bevel workflow. The way it works is that you create base geometry and add a Bevel + SubSurf. The role of the bevel is to counter the SubSurf (to some extent) and create hard(ish) edges where you want them. By default it treats every edge that way, which is something you rarely want. Luckily, you can specify the edges manually. 

One such way is to use a Vertex group. This is nice because you have your selection saved separately and you can view it and revise it fairly quickly. A major flaw, though, is that it doesn't work with edge data. Let me illustrate what I mean. Below is Bevel modifier set up for a Vertex group.

As you can see, all horizontal and vertical lines are highlighted. However, that's not what I'm trying to bevel. I want to exclude the vertical lines. This can be done if I switch to Edge select mode.

Now I'm applying the Bevel only to the outer edges and I'm getting smooth surface in-between. But I can't use Vertex group anymore. If you look at the panel on the right, I'm using the Weight option. This takes the "Mean Bevel Weight" edge value and transforms it into the bevelled edges. A big downside of this is that you have to enter this value manually for every edge selection (you can do it in the N panel, under "Transform"). And you can't see it very easily. There is an option in the "Select Similar" menu that let's you select edges with the same bevel value and you can specify a threshold for the retrieved values, but it still isn't as comfortable as selecting a Vertex group. Still, it is the option I decided to run with. 

I found out that the best value to use is 0.25. I'd have thought that 1 would be stronger, but it tends to create nasty shading artefacts. Maybe the 0.25 is ideal for a quad because its vertices are "pulled" with equal force? I don't know. It just worked for me the best. 

Another neat trick on my list is the use of a Screw modifier. See those lovely curvy rods all over the clock? Those must have been really hard to make... Right? No, not at all. Some time ago I found this video showing how to easily create a baby bottle. And I thought I might finally get to use it here. I just extruded vertices to create an outline of the shape (with Ctrl+whatever-mouse-button-you-do-not-use-for-selection). Then I enabled the modifier and boom! Shape ready. With nice topology as well. And it's non-destructive so you can move the vertices around as much as you like. If only the rest of the clock was as easy to make.

The clock face was... time-consuming. Everything you see is modelled, I didn't use any textures.

The ornamental... edge... thingy is made from a bevelled cube which has been arrayed ad absurdum. The letters and hands are vertex-extruded, and the minutes are arrayed again. That one was particularly nasty because anything so small that needs to create a circle has a bad attitude by default.

What else to add, hmmm. The eagles on top and the flowers are the only instances where I used sculpting (MultiRes, in this case). It just wouldn't be possible to get that level of detail by box modelling. If I was doing it, anyway. What else... Nope, I think this is all I wanted to say this week. The next one is introduction to sculpting, I think, and I've wanted to sculpt a horse for quite some time now. Should I do it? Let me know in the comments. (Also leave a comment if you have a better idea. I'm always happy to get those.) See you next time!